FINANCIAL TIMES / 2006

How the 1950s made the 1960s

No good can come of Bill Bryson’s latest reflections, those on his 50s childhood in the US, no good at all. Not that it’s his fault. It’s the miscomprehension that it will foster in those shaven headed, black T-shirted thirty-something commentators who slate the 60s as a pointlessly frivolous era of bad music, bad art, bad philosophy and bad acid.

It all seeps out every time a 60s icon dies or disappears, the latest being Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd a few weeks ago. Apparently the Floyd’s music was never that good and it reflected the vacuousness of an empty, overblown decade, hollowed out between the glorious innocent vitality of the rock ‘n’ roll 50s and the hard edged, politically charged 70s.

Now I don’t particularly care whether anyone who wasn’t even born when ‘Careful with that axe Eugene’ was being recorded appreciates the Floyd – it isn’t their music, it’s mine – but I do think one or two misconceptions about the 60s need to be corrected, if only for the slightly pompous reason of a more accurate historical analysis. The fact is that anyone who comments on the 60s solely from the perspective of the decades that followed is never going to get it right. You have to have lived through the 50s to appreciate why we reacted in the 60s in the way we did. And it is the only way to understand it.

The 50s are now rewritten by our social observers and commentators as a glorious duck's-arse haircut era of jivin’ exuberance and authenticity, mainly from watching too many American movies and believing what they read on the sleeve notes of compilation CDs of 50's rock. And now Bill Bryson’s memoirs of an era of scientific, commercial and social optimism will add to the decade’s hagiography.

But the UK 50s were very different from the US 50s, as Bryson acknowledges. People now think it was all like The Fonz and American Graffiti. But no-one had fridges, TVs, washing machines, cars, mobility, vision, imagination, Sunday was shut and dances, usually held in the church hall with the vicar on guitar singing ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’, closed at 10pm. You were so busy being bored.

This isn’t about ‘you were lucky to have a shoe box to live in’, this isn’t about bygone poverty. Well, it is, but it’s about poverty of opportunity, of vision, not financial poverty.

I can still remember the open-mouthed amazement with which I watched, on my grandmother’s TV bought for the coronation, children in check shirts and denim jeans in the I Love Lucy show step up to a fridge and take out a Coke – whatever that was – without asking.  And the total bewilderment with which I listened to the words of ‘Fun Fun Fun’ by the Beach Boys, released actually in the 60s but in that part that still belonged to the 50s. I understood the individual words, it wasn’t a language thing; it was their sheer meaninglessness when used in that conjunction:

‘Well she got her daddy's car and she cruised to the hamburger stand now …’ –

She ate out? She could go out on her own to eat? Her father had a CAR? He let his daughter drive it? SHE HAD A DRIVING LICENCE?  

‘And with the radio blasting goes cruising just as fast as she can now …’

I'd heard of wirelesses in cars but never actually seen one - how big must it be? And what was she listening to – ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ with Vic Oliver or was it ‘Sing Something Simple’ with the Mike Sammes Singers? What else was there where you could hear original recorded music apart from ‘Two Way Family Favourites’?

‘And she'll have fun fun fun til her daddy takes the T-Bird away …’

Now logically T-Bird must be the name of the car. But how can this be? Cars are called stentorian or authoritarian things like Prefect or Consul, Princess or Minor, Oxford or Cambridge. What is this … ?

When I first became aware of him, Elvis was a clean cut young man serving his country in Europe, making diplomatic visits to local schools and recording huge hits like ‘Wooden Heart’, a ballad half in German and based on an old German folk tune. Nobody under 45 wants to hear that.

I and every one of my contemporaries will tell you that the 50s is the smell of cooking cabbages and the sight of endless corridors of brown linoleum. Uncleared bomb sites. Smog. And The Four Minute Warning hung over all of us, the apocalyptic threat from a vengeful and mean-spirited God. (Bryson says that in his optimistic American 50s childhood even the Hydrogen Bomb was viewed as futuristically ‘cool’, a relaxed view allowed perhaps because the possibility of it ever reaching them was, compared to us, pretty remote. All I can say is it terrified me to tearful bedtimes on many a night.)

At my school, a grammar school in the home counties, you could be punished for being caught with a copy of the bright, fresh new Private Eye. The New Musical Express, although in those days just a pop newspaper, its brilliant radical pyrotechnic era yet many years off, was also banned.

One or two people possibly had a good time then, wealthier people, probably well into at least their thirties. You get the feeling that Humphrey Lyttleton, for example, knew his way around, as it seemed did Princess Margaret. And I dare say Noel Coward enjoyed himself. But for the rest of us it was bed by ten under lumpy eiderdowns, it was prefabs, contemptuous politicians in homburgs and heavy tweed overcoats and thick brown tea served with your spaghetti on toast.

Then in the mid 60s, four things happened; those under 25 came into the majority for the first time ever, that cohort had money in their pocket for the first time ever, an element of choice came into the shops – and the pill.

We went mad. Suddenly we were important, we mattered, our views and our money were sought, we couldn’t be told what to do any more. And the world was a technicolor kaleidoscope and we dived into it, head first. And of course we did lots of silly things, but then who wouldn’t? We were colts let out into a sunlit meadow, frolicking and frisking and kicking up our psychedelic heels - but you can only understand that if you appreciate the gloom and constraint of the 50s.

It’s interesting to see now who of that age group have turned on the 60s. There’s Tony Blair, increasingly authoritarian, the man who tried to exploit the quintessential ethos of the era as a groovy rock band manager – and failed. And yet a man who owes the potency of his charisma entirely to the 60s and the new approachability it brought to public figures. Then there’s the censorious Norman Tebbit, a more interesting and typical case, for you could see at the time those who were dancing in the dappled light and those who were lurking voyeuristically in the shrubbery, inhibited and purse lipped. What worried them was the evident and long overdue breakdown of the old inherited hierarchies of authority, within any class. It was terrifying for them to view a world where no-one would know their place any longer, where anyone could be anything and the old verities no longer had any meaning. It still does because it means the grip on the levers of power for ‘one of us’ is no longer guaranteed.

A lot went wrong. With our new freedoms the potency of stigma and its controlling element in society declined, and regretting its loss may at first seem illiberal. But whilst of course we can all do without the sort of stigma that lead to race riots, back street abortions and countless gay suicides, in a society where anything goes, anything went, and not all of it was going to be admirable or desirable. But this isn’t about what happened, it’s about why it happened and how we felt – and wouldn’t you have done it too?

Perhaps the closest anyone born since, say, 1953 can have experienced it was that morning on 1 May 1997 and in the all too few months afterwards with the euphoric election of the then first Blair government. The sense not just of release from a deadening weight but its replacement by something vibrant and immeasurably lighter is a worthy if concentrated sample of the feeling of the 60s. Interestingly in 1964 Harold Wilson and Labour also swept away a moribund, patrician and detached Conservative government of thirteen years. Difficult to argue that a career politician, a roly-poly pipe smoking little Yorkshireman in a Gannex raincoat was responsible for Jimi Hendrix and flower power, but it all contributed to the spirit of the years that followed.

With hindsight, for me the first streak of dawn twilight in the 1960s glimmered on the evening of the 24 November 1962. That was the night That Was The Week That Was capered with devastating effect into our front rooms, the first coherent massed breaking of ranks, a startlingly irreverent assault on The Establishment sometimes so disrespectful and provocative it was hard to believe you’d seen what you’d just seen, heard what you’d just heard. It was the first time ever politicians who deserved to be taken to task were taken to task so publicly, argued with, disbelieved, ridiculed. That was what marked the 60s; as The Who saw it, ‘we’re not going to take it’ and TWTWTW’s producer, Ned Sherrin, led the way. Watch it now. For me it still blazes but perhaps it won’t strike you as that remarkable.

But that’s my point. You had to have been there. And particularly, you had to have seen what was on the previous Saturday – and all the Saturday’s before that – to appreciate it.