History of England 1-6

It was a decade in which many supposedly inviolable traditions would be questioned. In 1957 a report on sex and sexuality was assembled. It is ironic, perhaps, that the Wolfenden Report echoed many of the concerns raised by the law it sought to overturn: the Labouchere Amendment. The issue, as before, involved prostitution. The ‘blackmailer’s charter’, as the 1885 amendment was known, was motivated in part by its author’s drive to extirpate underage prostitution. The Wolfenden Report sought to protect prostitutes from being exploited any more than they were already. Two years earlier, the Church of England had assembled a memorial on the question of sexuality, urging the government to ‘separate sin from statute’. It is hardly coincidental that the Church’s reputation for gentle compromise arose just as its political influence began to falter.

Meanwhile, the Cold War crept across minds and cabinet tables in a new Ice Age of anxiety. In its progress, it encouraged a curious doublethink. On the one hand, Stalin’s purges, the Ukrainian famine and even the Gulag itself were scarcely known; Stalin was still invoked as ‘Uncle Joe’. On the other, the Red Menace hung like a crow over a peaceful meadow. Its hour would come soon, it was whispered, and in that hour all freedoms, and perhaps all life, would be extinguished. For it, too, had the Bomb.

The Labour party under Attlee disavowed any connection with communism and even expelled members suspected of being fellow travellers. Communists were held to have powers of concealment almost preternatural in scope, and on 11 February this superstition seemed vindicated when Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, who had disappeared in 1951, now took shape again in Moscow five years later. Of the two, it was Burgess who caught the public imagination. He was charming, erudite, handsome and clever, qualities that made his apostasy all the more puzzling. ‘Surely only the aggrieved could become socialists?’ ran the reasoning. But Burgess had no genuine grievance, beyond a conviction that his peers had failed to appreciate his gifts. Like many English radicals, Burgess quickly found that he had little taste for Russia or the Russians. Apart from anything else, he missed cricket. Again, like many radicals, his nursery was Eton College. This school has often been seen as the forcing ground of the English establishment, but any paradox dissolves under scrutiny: Eton taught self-reliance within an atmosphere of uneasy equality.

Anger howled in many alleys during this supposedly settled period. The English theatre, dominated for four hundred years by bourgeois or aristocratic concerns, was to celebrate the kitchen and the bedroom along with the fury they might nurture. On 8 May 1956, Look Back in Anger was first staged.

English theatre was previously notable for three professional playwrights and two poets. J. B. Priestley, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan had very different styles and political opinions, but their subjects were broadly the same: middle-or upper-middle-class people whose ingenious attempts to fend off reality led to comic or tragic failures. They were schooled in the tradition that the business of art was to entertain rather than preach. While these three wrote in a style that owed at least something to the cadences of ordinary speech, T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry wrote in verse, on explicitly or subtly religious themes. During the post-war years, overt religious affiliation was gradually being diminished. How could it draw audiences when it could scarcely keep congregations?

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger embodied other spirits. And when Jimmy Porter, a young man fulminating against the world, savages the women in the play for their supposed distance from reality, he sets the tone for later generations. The play could only have belonged to the newly affluent, newly educated Fifties. The Royal Court used the expression ‘angry young man’ to describe Osborne, shrewdly hinting that they had coined it. But it was a term already current in 1951. And its most distinctive avatars appeared in fiction, not on the stage.

To call the movement ‘leftist’ would be reductive and inaccurate, and ‘workingclass’ will not quite serve. The opening salvo of the movement is an instance in point. John Wain’s Hurry On Down, published in 1953, tells the story of Charles Lumley, an irritant abroad, and his search for freedom and authenticity. Such a quest is ideally bourgeois, but the time was not ripe for that irony to be apparent: the middle classes were not yet rich enough. Lumley becomes a window cleaner, a chauffeur and a drug dealer. True love proves his salvation in an ending that is at best uneasily hymeneal: he and his love simply look at each other, their expressions ‘baffled and enquiring’.