Philip Larkin famously located Britain’s sexual revolution in 1963, “Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” Until that cork‑popping moment, sex for the repressed people of these islands meant only “a wrangle for the ring”, and “a shame that started at sixteen”; whereas after it, “every life became / A brilliant breaking of the bank”. The fact that Larkin, then in his early 40s, felt this had come “rather late” for him personally didn’t stop him naming the year an Annus Mirabilis.
The year 1963 is also where the social historian David Kynaston has arrived in his epic account of post-second world war Britain, Tales of a New Jerusalem, which now reaches its fourth instalment, entitled A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65. Kynaston’s eye is cooler than Larkin’s, yet he, too, identifies a cultural hinge-point in this short period (the book covers only 28 months). This was the moment, midway between Clement Attlee’s landslide Labour win of 1945 and Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979, when the “Daddy Knows Best” culture of the 50s began to crumble and a freer, more individualistic Britain emerged.
Kynaston’s method, for those who don’t know it, is to gather a vast breadth of primary material, which he curates almost as much as he writes. Sources here are drawn from an admirable cross-section of society – pig farmers as well as prime ministers. Readers of earlier volumes may recognise some of his stable of diarists – Judy Haines, a “middle-aged housewife” in Chingford; Veronica Lee, a pupil at a girls’ grammar in Crediton; as well as precocious future celebrities such as Gyles Brandreth and Maureen Lipman. The result of this great collation is a bird’s eye view, where the bird is a sharp-eyed falcon and the view something like looking down on Glastonbury festival. The weight of detail can become overwhelming, especially when Kynaston gathers lists of unconnected events into enormous, semicolon-strewn sentences. But mass observation requires masses of material, and soon we start to detect patterns in the murmurations.
Kynaston starts where he left off, in early October 1962, when the Beatles have just put out their first single, Love Me Do, and the first Bond film, Dr No, has just opened in British cinemas. Immediately we find echoes of our own political era. The country is at the tired end of 11 years of Tory rule, the government is in fraught, shall-we/shan’t-we negotiations over membership of the Common Market, and disastrous decisions are about to be made on the railways, following Dr Beeching’s report. An international crisis (over Soviet missiles in Cuba) threatens open conflict with Moscow, and a government minister, ex-Bullingdon Club, is caught lying to parliament (John Profumo). Plus ça change, you might think, reading all this, but Kynaston’s editorial touch is light, and he doesn’t dwell on the modern parallels. Mostly, he wants us to understand “what Britain looked like, sounded like and felt like” in those years. So what kind of place was it? And what was about to change?
A dominant theme is the country’s attitude to its ruling class. Postwar Britain remained snobbish and regimented. The elite was drawn from a handful of public schools, where they were trained to strip out all emotion and to speak in voices that were riddled with “aloof, condescending superiority”, as Ted Hughes described them. By the early 60s, this group was being lampooned as “the establishment”, not least by the BBC’s That Was the Week That Was, first broadcast in November 1962, and fronted by a 23-year-old ex-grammar school boy from Kent, David Frost. Frost made the perfect establishment foil, arriving on television screens with a “curiously classless accent, sloppy charcoal suit and overambitious haircut”, as the programme’s creator Ned Sherrin recalled.
Frost, the Beatles, Dr No: the 60s had begun to swing, but Britain remained a dilapidated state, home at the end of 1962 to more than a million slum houses, and 4m homes that had no bathroom or hot running water. The planners responded by bulldozing the terraces and replacing them with high-rises as per the US model, without much listening to the people who had to move into them. Brutalist new designs were brought to the town centres, too, with Georgian squares torn down and replaced by giant shopping complexes, complete with multistorey car parks to accommodate the motorists who, thanks to Beeching, continued to increase in number.
Class snobbery was one prejudice that dogged UK society. There were others. It will shock some to read that 16.5 million people tuned in each week to watch the BBC’s The Black and White Minstrel Show, or that “colour bars”, overt and covert, operated across all aspects of British life. In 1963, the Bristol Omnibus Company refused to employ black crews, and the Transport and General Workers’ Union tacitly connived with these kinds of tactics. In the general election of 1964, the Tory strategy in Smethwick, in the West Midlands, was so staggeringly racist that Harold Wilson, newly installed as PM, called out the Conservative MP who had emerged victorious for being a “parliamentary leper”, triggering a mass Tory walkout.
Sexism and homophobia were rife, too. Women, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, had few prospects beyond marriage, motherhood and housework.
So far, so terrible, but positive aspects of 60s Britain also emerge from Kynaston’s sources. Politicians of all hues at this time were committed to the welfare state, and to the idea of making society more equal. Living standards were rising fast; income inequality was low; and ideas for what we now call levelling up were big and serious. At one moment, the government considered creating a British Brasília, a new capital city in the north. For a time, before the Labour conference rejected the motion, it seemed possible that the public school system might be abolished.
Optimism about the future abounded, as Wilson recognised in his “white heat of technology” speech, while labour-saving devices and the consumer boom would deliver more free time and more choice. In 1964, Terence Conran opened the first branch of Habitat, kickstarting a new era of British design. This was also a golden era for the arts, when Britain supported a huge range of talent – to name a few: Joan Littlewood, Sylvia Plath, Harold Pinter, Peter Brook, Dennis Potter, Michael Frayn, Iris Murdoch.
But it was pop music, and above all the Beatles, that stood in the vanguard of social change. John, Paul, George and Ringo return repeatedly in Kynaston’s narrative, steamrollering their way from Merseyside into the national consciousness, accompanied everywhere by hordes of screaming teenagers; artfully scandalising and charming their way through the web of class rules. At the Royal Variety Performance in 1963, Lennon requested that the people in the cheaper seats “clap [their] hands” while the well-to-do crowd, including the Queen Mother, should “just rattle your jewellery”. How a nation swooned!
Could Churchill really still be alive as such moments unfolded? He was, but not for much longer. A Northern Wind concludes with his funeral, on 30 January 1965. The era of empire and social deference was almost gone, and the postwar consensus was disappearing, too. Veronica Lee was a student by then, living in a shared house in Leeds. She and her housemates had a mixed response to news of Churchill’s death, which she recorded in her diary. “Val and I felt fairly sad,” she wrote, “but Di said he was awar-mongering old bugger.” So the page turned.
• A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65 by David Kynaston is published by Bloomsbury (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
