In February 1965, the civil rights activist Malcolm X visited Smethwick, in the Midlands, where the Conservative-run council was planning to buy up houses to stop the area becoming a “coloured ghetto”. He wanted to see how bad the racism was and he experienced it first-hand when refused service in a pub. White residents thought his visit a “disgusting” intrusion.
Nine days later, back in the US, he was shot dead. Britain in the mid-60s is associated with Carnaby Street, the Beatles and miniskirts, not racism. But what Black people endured, from a colour bar on property to the abuse of Leeds United winger Albert Johanneson as a “golliwog”, is no less a period marker than Harold Wilson’s pipe, Twiggy’s haircut, Mary Whitehouse’s clean-up TV campaign and Bob Dylan’s use of an electric guitar.
David Kynaston doesn’t underplay the excitements of the period. But he rightly emphasises that the rotten old 50s – patriarchal, homophobic, class-divided and bigoted – wouldn’t just fade away. His mammoth project, a history of Britain from 1945‑79, is now past halfway.
He originally expected this volume to continue to 1967. In the event it covers just 18 months, from February 1965 to July 1966, and (with notes) runs to nearly 700 pages. The challenge is to balance an in-depth account of politics, economics, industry, education and culture with personal stories of what it was like to be there: the food you ate, the clothes you wore, the films you saw.
The sources he draws on range from statistical surveys and sociological reports to political biographies, personal diaries and the grouchy letters of Philip Larkin. No living historian is as comprehensive. With much to accommodate, he relies on the semicolon for day-by-day narration: “At a Monday morning cabinet session…;” “later that afternoon …;” “on the box the same evening …;” “next morning in Manchester … ;” and so on.
The sentences are long but full of humour and never dull. The high point comes with a “freewheelin’, mid-60s play list” (duly abbreviated here) that takes up five pages: Multi-flavoured Golden Wonder crisps displacing Smith’s plain; one-third of new marriages now civil marriages; pubs reluctantly installing fruit machines; Jimmy Hill’s Sky-Blue revolution at Coventry City; AA patrols no longer required to salute; picture rails, seen as dust traps, removed en masse from Victorian and Edwardian houses; Boots from 1965 at last consenting to sell condoms; arrival of open-plan offices; arrival, too, of the hot drinks vending machine; no car more iconic of modernity than the Mini Cooper … As well as giving us snippets from daily life and reminding us how nasty the 60s could be (Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and the Kray brothers), Kynaston devotes chapters to larger-scale cultural shifts, chief among them in education. Harold Wilson dreamed of “a Britain in which anyone can get to the top on merit and ability, not on social or family connections”, and the shift to comprehensive schools was integral to that.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
