In 1958, T. H. White offered a quite different vision of the past and of how it should be interpreted. Like Tolkien, he was an academic, and unappeasable loathing for the cant of politicians and the horrors of imperialism also bind the two. But there the comparisons cease. Where The Lord of the Rings progressed from being a story for children to a novel for adults to a romance for our ancestors, The Once and Future King was postmodernist, which so soon after modernism was a remarkable feat. A picaresque version of the story of King Arthur, it subverts everything possible in the revered legend. Here, Arthur is ‘Wart’, an idealistic but callow boy who is to be sent to Oxford in the Dark Ages. Merlyn is an eccentric tutor with birds in his hair, whose wisdom comes from having lived backwards.
Beneath the aphorisms and persiflage, White’s book hews its way into the rotten heart of statecraft and of power. Anachronisms abound, and the last is the most terrible. Mordred’s troops use shells on London, at which juncture Arthur knows that the age of chivalry is truly dead. In time, ‘fantasy’ would be the lazy catch-all term for this genre. It is one that both authors would have rejected – they were addressing reality.
37
Riots of passage
In an age renowned for its dourness, foliage seemed to sprout from the furniture. Roses were stitched on bedspreads, lilies on sofas and orchids on ‘pouffes’. Images of the countryside enriched an increasingly suburban England. That the countryside was in retreat lent the fashion an added poignancy. But if interiors had become cosier, public spaces had grown unforgiving. The ersatz opulence of rose-scattered sofas was met by a countertrend in public spaces, owing much to the new severity of American and continental fashions. Clean, sharp lines were favoured in cafes, clubs and office blocks, as if the world of science fiction had already landed.
Another group of angry young men began to appear; they may have been rebels without causes, but they possessed flags and war cries in abundance. In 1953, vague references to the ‘New Edwardian style’ sharpened to a name: the Teddy boys had arrived. They bore little relation to the clean, pretty boys of the Eighties who would wear bright colours and winsome smiles – the ‘Teds’ of the Fifties did not set out to please. It had begun as an upper-class trend. After the war, tailors had attempted to encourage trade by resurrecting the fashions of the Edwardian era. Their market was the wealthy, but workingclass teenagers developed a taste for the new style. How could they afford it? Either by paying in instalments or by sticking to the cheapest but most distinctive items of the look. Its prodigality spoke of a new phenomenon in an affluent working class. The Teds did not merely copy the clothing of the 1900s – they parodied it, adding elements such as the ‘zoot suit’ favoured by black gangs in the United States. A mirage of respectability would become the conduit for rebellion. Quickly, and cheerfully, they established a reputation for violence. The Garston ‘blood baths’ of Liverpool, where Teddy boy gangs regularly clashed, were infamous.
But not all teenage boys were Teds, and not all Teds were members of gangs. The stigma was largely unearned; it was, above all, a style. More significant was the role of the press in creating that stigma. English youth had been cynosures of disapproval since the glory days of the apprentices in the seventeenth century. The Teds were heirs to the apprentices, in spirit if not in diligence, and thus a fear of supposedly feral youth was again coaxed from its cave. No one who stood out in those days could be trusted, particularly when they wore a costume which was considered to be ‘as outlandish as it was sinister’.
Here, Edwardian elegance was twisted. In place of fob watches, the Teds sported bicycle chains, their purpose unsettlingly clear. The tight ‘drainpipe’ trousers stopped just below the ankle. Broad, crêpe-covered ‘beetle-crushers’ stood in place of brogues. And then there was the famous hairstyle, on which two birds made their mark: a cockatoo’s comb in front and a ‘duck’s arse’ behind. Just as the last strands of aristocratic influence were falling between the shears, the dandy had been resurrected, though now he was workingclass.
And in this perhaps lay the true offence. For though it was only ever hinted at, many must have felt that it was simply not ‘proper’ for the working classes to ape the dress of their betters. Swinging their chains, combing their hair, locking and unlocking their razors, the Teds paced the streets. Their uniform was their own rather than the garb of a trade, for they had no trade. Thus we may truly speak of the first teenage ‘style’, not that they were in the slightest measure revolutionary. If anything, they could show a vein of fascism. Events later in the decade were to bear this out.
Whether the Teddy boy was as great a source of societal pollution as many believed is doubtful; it was more significant that pollution as a whole had become an urgent matter of public health. When the mist of the Thames met the murk of the chimneys in a fog of eerie green, silence and blindness fell. For years, Londoners had told visitors not to trouble themselves about it, but any such insouciance lost its charm in 1952. In that year, the ‘London Smog’ claimed 4,000 lives. The gay, gaudy city that Monet had painted less than a century before was obliged to clear its lungs. On 5 July 1955, the Clean Air Act was passed, a somewhat delayed response to the smog that had struck in the coronation year.
A simple trade agreement between France and Germany in the late Forties was now taking root as the European Communities began to cohere. The cabinet’s Economic Policy Committee remained unconvinced on Europe. It was ‘against the interests of the United Kingdom to join the Common Market’, it asserted in November 1955. This was understandable. There was a confidence that England, supported by the Commonwealth and with her mighty transatlantic ally beside her, could retain her former stance.
In 1956, the island received a double irruption from East and West. Khrushchev and Bulganin arrived from the Soviet Union to begin an official visit to the UK. Little came of it in practical terms, but its symbolic significance was enough. Bullish, brash but shrewd, Khrushchev had nothing in common with Eden, who on this occasion offered little but a blustering assurance that Britain would go to war to guard her oil reserves. The visit was further marred by the mysterious loss of a British soldier around the wreck of a Russian submarine. The other irruption was the showing of Rock Around the Clock, a short American film about nothing in particular. Its significance was to be far more than symbolic, since it was the first rock-and-roll musical extravaganza.
The first signs could be felt of a fraying in the post-war consensus. On 1 June 1956, Macmillan warned Eden of financial collapse. Inflation would continue if Britain continued to live beyond its means. The promise of full employment had been central to the Attlee settlement, but, coupled with defence spending and overseas commitments, it was proving hard to sustain. From the disenchanted and disenfranchised Left came a new approach. In that year, Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism was published. Crosland remains an ambiguous figure in the annals of the Labour movement, and this in part reflects the ambiguity of his thought. His book was well regarded at the time, but it is little remembered now. The oversight is easily explained: his ideas were taken up, almost forty years later, by a politician far more ambitious and considerably more accommodating.
Crosland argued that the post-war consensus was in danger of failing its own goals. Nationalization had become an empty shibboleth. Socialists were in danger of mistaking means for ends. They must remember that their primary mission was to abolish poverty, not inequality. He wrote: ‘We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places.’ There had been too much flattening in the socialist vision; it was time for humanity to be lifted. In one respect, Crosland’s insights were tacitly acknowledged to be unanswerable. Nationalization needed nourishment, after all. The trope ‘while stocks last’ increasingly applied not just to necessities in the home, but to those that fed and fired the household. How long could coal, gas or electricity last?