An English Affair. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ made people tick and what made them kick. They divided us, depressed us, disillusioned us and nearly destroyed us.’ By contrast, since 1951, ‘we have swept away all the paraphernalia of controls and proved that Conservative freedom does work to the benefit of everyone’. Voters were ‘glad to be free of controls; but a Labour Government would clamp them on again … This is your life – don’t let Labour ruin it.’⁵⁰

      Hugh Trevor-Roper, who masterminded Macmillan’s election as Chancellor of Oxford University in 1960, thought that the tendency of the times was towards ‘a vulgar, jolly, complacent, materialist social democracy’. He found ominous ‘the universal absorbent materialism even of spiritual life which has triumphed in America and, unless one fights against it, will gradually triumph here too – has already triumphed in the majority of the population’. A Salford bookmaker’s son thought similarly to the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. ‘I jumped at the chance,’ Albert Finney said in 1961 of his lead in the screen version of Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, ‘because of what the film had to say about our present-day smash-and-grab society’. Some Tories shuddered at Macmillan’s bribery of voters. During elections, declared a discontented backbencher in 1962, each political party entered ‘a sort of spiv auction, each one trying to outbid the other with promises of material gain to the masses, in the cynical belief that the electorate is composed of unthinking dupes whose highest aspiration in life is to worship Mammon’.⁵¹

      If Macmillan’s England seemed a smash-and-grab society to some, it remained a place of frugal, unimaginative routines for many others. Michael Wharton, the Daily Telegraph columnist, lunched every working day in a dingy Fleet Street pub on an identical meal of corned beef sandwiches washed down by brandy and ginger. He ate the same supper each evening at his Battersea flat of lime juice and soda with five fish fingers (never more or less). Yet Wharton felt deep passions, cravings and regrets, as shown by his lament for England in 1961: ‘Her empire and influence is almost gone; her patriots are too much ashamed and beaten down with incessant jeers to speak up for her, or if they do, their voices are shrill and ugly with rancour’ (a reference to the League of Empire Loyalists, a group of embittered hecklers, opposed to decolonisation, who followed Macmillan about shouting that he was a traitor). As to the countryside, farmers had become ‘money-mad mechanics, forever searching for new poisons for the soil which will ensure quick profits at any cost’; fox-hunters chased their quarry around housing estates; Morris dancers cavorted beside atomic power stations; in summer the Lake District was infested by smelly, honking pleasure traffic.

      Wharton did not wonder that England, ‘the first country to suffer industrialisation and uniquely vulnerable to its final triumph, clings to survivals, landed titles, splendid rituals’. The move towards classlessness was a drift into stereotypes and the culture of grievance. ‘Policemen and sociologists, clergymen and psychiatrists are chasing the fashionable hooligans and sex maniacs; housewives yawn in deathly new towns; journalists, television interviewers and experts endlessly discuss the Problems of Today. There is the Problem of Youth, the Problem of Delinquency, the Problem of Coloured Immigration, the Problem of the Eleven Plus, the Problem of Parking.’ People thought less in terms of class loyalties, and increasingly as categories of oppressed: ‘as teenagers, homosexuals, motorists, misunderstood criminals and so on’. Mammon ruled under Macmillan, Wharton thought. ‘Over all this England, with its mingled apathy and desperation, lies a thick fog of money and of the operations of money. The ideal Englishman of the advertisements is no longer an aristocrat; he has become a salesman or a financial speculator. His office skyscrapers shoot up overnight where familiar old buildings have been (and he hires public relations men to tell us how much more beautiful they are than the old buildings and makes us ashamed of ourselves for thinking otherwise); his empires of money grow and combine, grow and combine again, continually devising new needs, new categories of people to feel those needs and buy the goods that will satisfy them, temporarily, until new needs can be devised.’⁵²

      About the time that Churchill retired as Prime Minister in 1955, the patriotic catchphrases that public men had traditionally parroted abruptly began to seem bogus, weary and redundant. A few months later, after the revelations of the Burgess-Maclean espionage cover-up, the word ‘Establishment’ was first deployed with the overtone that anything established was suspect. The notion flourished that political, administrative and economic authority was controlled by a secretive sect with strange rites and arcane customs – a mafia comprised of Wykehamists and Etonians. ‘There certainly exists in Britain a number of persons, many of them known to each other and sometimes educated together, who exercise considerable power and influence of the kind that is not open to direct public inspection,’ wrote the young philosopher Bernard Williams at the time of the general election of 1959. ‘Large areas of British life are permeated by mediocrity and the refusal to face genuine issues. Influential figures undoubtedly share, in their own refined complacent way, these characteristics, but they are not the cause of them.’ Henry Fairlie, the political journalist who was amongst the most perceptive commentators on Macmillan’s premiership, complained in the same year that this demure coinage, ‘the Establishment’, had been debauched by publicists until it was a harlot of a phrase used promiscuously by dons, novelists, playwrights, artists, actors, critics, scriptwriters and band leaders to denote those in positions of authority whom they disliked. The Establishment’s defenders argued that it was rooted in neither class nor sectional interest, and was, therefore, disinterested. Its opponents found this lack of passion or commitment to be depressing, and perhaps reprehensible.⁵³

      Macmillan’s appointment of a Scottish earl, Home, as Foreign Secretary in 1960, and of his wife’s nephew, the Duke of Devonshire, to the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1961, provoked the anti-Establishment pundits to fume (although neither man failed at his post). The Tories traditionally believed that the tests of experience and of time were sound guides, but after the 1959 election victory appeals to tradition were no longer winning. Instead, Tory leaders had to place themselves as the people best able to manage change. By 1962, Macmillan was trying to identify his party as the modernisers and Labour as retrogressive: Marples’s disastrous transport policies and Britain’s ill-fated application to join the Common Market were at the forefront of this strategy.

      In July 1962, the Observer journalist and former gossip columnist Anthony Sampson published his Anatomy of Britain which, on the basis of interviews with political, business and official leaders, presented public life as amateurish, caste-ridden, dithering and cowed. His bestseller operated by the technique of the pre-war fellow-travellers who compiled Union of Democratic Control pamphlets: genealogical tables revealing distant, unsuspected cousinhoods; Venn diagrams of overlapping company directorships and schematic representations of power relations all tending to suggest there was a loose conspiracy by undemocratic, debilitated and incompetent fuddy-duddies. Sampson had a priggish belief that people should be spurred hard by overriding moral purposes; in an earlier generation he might have been a disciple of Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament group. He seemed to idealise men who worked exorbitantly long hours, scorned holidays and judged themselves virtuous for spreading stress in their offices.

      Sampson’s book chimed with the clashing cymbals of opinion-making in 1962. Jack Plumb, the son of a Leicester shoe factory worker, was a communist in the 1930s, a Bletchley Park codebreaker during the war, a Cambridge history don from 1946 and an avid, frustrated crosspatch with a beady eye for the main chance. ‘Your time is coming,’ his lifelong confidant C. P. Snow promised him in 1960, ‘one can smell it in the air.’ Initially Plumb resented tradition: in 1962, for example, he decried the privileged readers of history books as ‘those who had nannies, prep-schools, dorms, possess colonels and bishops for cousins, and now take tea once a year on the dead and lonely lawns of the Palace’. In time he proved the very model of an anti-Establishment skirmisher who, once his enemies were routed, annexed their domains of influence and adopted their style and amenities which he had all along irritably envied. Soon he had a rectory in Suffolk and a moulin in France, ingratiated himself with philanthropic millionaires and smart noblewomen, looked cocksure in the private apartments of palaces, became a conspicuous member of Brooks’s, figured until the last moment among the СКАЧАТЬ