The groovy year good old Britain died
For Philip Larkin, the Permissive Society began in 1963 — perhaps so he could rhyme it with ‘ the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles’ first LP’. Christopher Bray much more convincingly argues that ‘the old Britain died and the new Britain was born’ two years later, when ‘liberating legislation on homosexuality, divorce, abortion, race and censorship’ was brought in — creating a culture in which, half a century later, things that were once banned are pretty much compulsory.
In 1965, let me tell you, I was five. As an authoritative eye-witness, therefore, I can assert that though, in this pivotal year, John le Carre, Harold Pinter and John Fowles got into their stride, Alf Garnett appeared on our screens, Ian Brady was arrested for murder and Concorde was being built in Bristol, society was losing more than it was gaining.
Divorce rates doubled between 1965 and 1970. They quadrupled by 1975.
There were nine million cars in Britain at the beginning of the Sixties, 16 million by 1970. Today there are 31.25 million. Utterly mad. Cars are eating our cities and countryside like cockroaches.
Yet in 1965, Anthony Crosland, the Labour politician who’d eradicated grammar schools, said: ‘All of us want the car and the greater freedom of mobility it brings.’
What wicked short-sightedness. Britain simply became polluted and congested. The M4 opened in 1965, which had the effect of letting the Welsh out: I was among them.
The growth of the motor industry meant wanton architectural destruction. Though ‘developers’ protested, Conservation Areas began to be established in 1965 — otherwise, the Georgian terraces of Islington, North London, for example, would have been flattened.
The philistines did succeed in decimating the railways, however. In 1965, 1,071 miles of track were torn up, charming stations demolished, country towns and villages cut off. ‘Passengers were the last things on Beeching’s mind,’ says Bray.
Beeching’s axe was an ‘exercise in market-driven ideology’ — bloody hell — and he was heedless of everything that John Betjeman, say, loved and cherished about the English landscape, its ‘peace and seclusion’ and age-old quaintness, upon which no price can be put.
PErHAPS
this is what 1965 most represents — the clash of an older, merrier England, the England we’d fought two World Wars to protect, and a bleak future of concrete and glass, where everyone was under the influence of mescaline and LSD.
Bray’s most interesting point is that despite the apparent newness of everything — the gleaming plastic James Bond interiors of the QE2 or Thunderbirds on ITV — it was a schizoid and divided time.
Unwrap what was new, inside it was old and traditional. The Beatles may have appeared to embody ‘mad dreamscapes’ in Help, but their lyrics are ‘suffused with nostalgia for a world gone by’.
And to get the full benefit of the ‘satire boom’, to pick up the clever- clever jokes, you needed to have gone to oxford and Cambridge, or to have received an old-fashioned education. When Peter Cook opened the Establishment Club, the most satirical thing about it was that the members were (uppermiddle class) members of the Establishment.
To look back at 1965 is to want to side very strongly indeed with the traditional values that were being upended, not to applaud the things that were fab and cool and trendy.
Too many cars, too many people, too much pretentiousness — and, since 1965, too few risks. Bray points out that ‘one of the biggest cultural changes in Britain in the past 50 years’ is that children ‘are not allowed to play outside without heavily vetted adult supervision’.
Absolutely true. Kiddies remain in their rooms, growing obese as they diddle with their computers and smartphones, unable to socialise face to face, speak, discuss or form sentences. They are convinced everyone over 25 is a paedo.
There will never again be a young roger Lewis, patrolling the zeitgeist, missing nothing and being cross about it. Now it’s people wearing bright synthetic fabrics; it’s texting and tapas.
Something — altogether far too much — has been lost.