History of England 1-6

Powell scorned the notion that one race could be ‘superior to another’, but logic compelled him to follow his reasoning wherever it led. His premises, however, were not universally shared. For him the object of politics was the coherence of the state and society, and many might have agreed. Many, too, would have accepted his notion of a realm united under a queen, with parliament as sovereign. But he considered this coherence or unity to be as necessary in town and village as it was in Westminster and believed that if it should be threatened, bloodshed would follow. As he never tired of asserting, it was not for him a question of colour. However that may be, his speech destroyed his chances of ever again attaining high office. It did not, however, curtail his influence on politics. Although his more apocalyptic predictions came to nothing, in the field of economics he was to prove the prophet of the movement that would become known as monetarism.

43

The soothing dark

For members of the ‘commentariat’, the early Sixties had been heavy with pessimism, even of fatalism. The Economist had noted that ‘All the political parties are going into their annual conferences with plans … to put Britain right by bringing it up to date; each promises that, like a detergent, it will wash whiter. The British have become, suddenly, the most introspective people on earth.’ It was not alone. Nonfiction presses ran almost dry with laments for the ‘state of the nation’. One of the most influential was Suicide of a Nation (1963), edited by Arthur Koestler. In this book, Malcolm Muggeridge articulated an ominous thought. ‘Each time I return to England from abroad the country seems a little more run down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier; its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier … and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.’ This mood had lifted in the second half of the decade, but it was to reassert itself. It cannot have helped that, in 1967, de Gaulle had for the second time vetoed Britain’s joining the Common Market. The Wilson administration seemed dazed and bewildered in the face of continental obduracy.

But, as ever in the Sixties, the people had their diversions. Watching the television had become something of a national sport in itself, and by the end of the decade, all but the poorest homes had their own set. And the small screen accommodated every taste – one could be stirred by The Avengers, comforted by The Forsyte Saga or amused by Till Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son and a gentle but brilliantly observed comedy about the Home Guard called Dad’s Army. Certainly, there was little to draw people to the larger screens. British cinema comprised scarcely more than Bond, pop art pretension and camp comedy. It could hardly be otherwise: by the late Sixties, funding for British films came almost exclusively from the United States, and when the quality of British film began to wane, the flow of money stopped.

One fine Sixties innovation, however, was the so-called ‘caper movie’. The greatest, and silliest, example of this genre was The Italian Job, released in 1969. Here, a plausible crook named Charlie Croker steals 4 million pounds’ worth of bullion from under the noses of the Mafia, aided by a team of very English criminals. They manage to get their stash up into the Alps when disaster strikes. The film ends with their bus leaning over a vast gulf, and Croker (played by Michael Caine) assuring the gang that he has ‘a great idea’, with somewhat frayed confidence.

For all the film’s virtues, it might have vanished had it not so winningly caught a particular brand of Englishness: amateurish, sunny and yet quietly implacable. And it represented, too, a reversion to the spirit of the early Sixties. This was not the slick, self-assured world captured in the Bond films. The times were less certain and so was the culture reflecting them; perhaps, in spite of the empty promises of statesmen, the dulled diamonds of flower power and the disappointments of technology, there existed the conviction that ordinary, traditional pluck might see the nation through. In any case, the end of American funding was not the disaster it might have been. For one thing, it led to the success of the Hammer studios. Towards the end of the Sixties and deep into the Seventies, films about Dracula and Frankenstein, witches and werewolves were devoured avidly by audiences and excoriated eagerly by critics.

Then there were the Carry On films, which in the Sixties took a turn for the bawdy. Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor and, on occasion, Frankie Howerd, starred in films where no sacred cow was left unmolested. From the hospital to the camping field, from ancient Rome to imperial India, the Carry On team titillated and tickled the audience. In a very English eschewing of the erotic, they brought back a spirit of holiday fun, with brassieres popping and zips jamming.