A forgotten irony lies in the notion of the post-war consensus, since in truth it had been developed under both Labour and Tory auspices. By the mid-Fifties, however, notions of a grand ideological confrontation existed only as fodder for journalists. The belief that the state must support its citizens if it is to demand anything of them had been tacitly absorbed by all parties. The post-war consensus was at last in place. The only question was whether it could hold its own.
Nationalization of services was almost complete by the mid-Fifties. To return the means, and the fruits, of production to the producers had been the grand mission. But how much had really changed? The children’s book series Thomas the Tank Engine by Wilbert and Christopher Awdry spanned three decades but began in 1945. The anthropomorphic engines have a fond mentor in the rotund shape of the Fat Director, Sir Topham Hatt, Bt. In the tale of James the Red Engine, the Fat Director becomes the Fat Controller. Clearly, nationalization has struck. It had been a project advanced as much by Conservatives as by socialists, and it was not always easy to see how the central cast had altered. The Fifties saw a gradual acceptance of the post-war settlement. Government cooperation with the union movement continued, and even accelerated, under the Conservatives. At this point, all appeared to be in agreement.
With widening education, however, came a certain unease. Was to be educated to accept the thirty pieces of silver? Such a notion would have seemed strange a hundred years earlier, when an education was a source of pride for many of the working class. But the working class was itself in transition, culturally and racially. The word ‘minority’ also changed its meaning in the Fifties. Before, it had usually referred to the Welsh or to women; now it turned outwards, to signify the immigrant. The notion of a ‘white’ England was most often a chimera; there had been black communities in England long before the Windrush generation, just as there had been black servicemen in the war. And as for the empire, the English knew it as something in the papers – now they learned of it through their neighbours.
But the riots that broke in Notting Hill in the summer of 1958 had nothing to do with neighbours. It was a hot, hate-filled summer. One black resident recalled the riots thus: ‘We could feel the pressure was there … You were constantly being threatened on the streets.’ ‘Kill the niggers!’ rose the cry on Portobello Road and Colville Road. It was a grisly echo of the Thirties, when ‘We’ve got to get rid of the Yids’ cawed from the throats of blackshirts. Caribbeans were targeted, and their property attacked. But then, after years of battening down the hatches, they turned. ‘We were getting the worst of it, until a few of us decided to fight back … And when they came, we attacked before they did and they ran away.’ The police did their best, but the tide had turned. As well as bruisable skin, ‘minorities’ had heart, muscle and spirit. It was not the Teddy boys’ finest hour. They participated gleefully in the baiting of Caribbeans, but were then repelled.
Racism was not the only neurosis to afflict the country. As Hugh Gaitskell saw it, there was a creeping undercurrent of anti-Americanism too. ‘It is easy to see,’ he said, ‘how powerful anti-American sentiment can be when to this already difficult relationship is added the genuine fear felt by many people that America will land us all in war.’ It was prophetic in many respects, but he need not have worried. Beyond the environs of Westminster, the people were largely untroubled by the concerns Gaitskell ascribed to them. By the Fifties, any residual resentment towards American culture was balanced by a hunger for its boons. And the music sent over the airwaves was a boon indeed. Whatever was resented in the fiscal debt to the United States, the youth of England appreciated this inrush of hope.
First from the jukeboxes of the milk bars and then from the cafes, in the music that cooed over the airwaves there was an influence both old and new. It was the brash, generous, overbearing confluent of the United States. During the Second World War, willing girls and reluctant boys had begun to notice that Americans seemed to have it all, and the Fifties did everything to encourage that impression. In 1956 Bill Haley & His Comets released ‘Rock Around the Clock’, an example of the new trend known as rock ’n’ roll. The genre had numerous parents, all of them black, but political considerations required that its ambassadors be white. Haley himself was a plump little man with a kiss-curl on his forehead, fronting what was, in essence, a jazz band. Yet his energy and panache submerged all objections.
He was followed by Elvis Presley, or ‘the King’, as he became known. Songs like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Hound Dog’ would not have passed muster later, when musicianship and wordcraft were prized, but when sung in the Elvis purr and accompanied by gyrations so suggestive as to give the singer the sobriquet ‘Elvis the Pelvis’, they achieved mass hysteria and Olympian sales. It also helped that he was not merely handsome but beautiful, exciting but unthreatening. This was not, of course, the rock ’n’ roll that purists recognized; for them, Chuck Berry was the king. In lifting the old blues from the piano to the guitar, he had become the founder of a genre. This would be remembered in the slumbering years.
The blaze of excitement soon settled in England. Sooner or later, the instinct of a young audience is to scramble onto the stage and join in, but despite its workingclass origins, rock ’n’ roll needed instruments that were far beyond the means of English youth. Pianos, double basses, drums and even guitars lay at an impossible distance. It seemed as if an old law would reassert itself: the passion dies that cannot be performed.
The name ‘skiffle’ was a dialect word from the West Country, meaning ‘a mess’. In the United States, the term came to be applied to a kind of music in which only the most rudimentary instruments were employed. Appropriately enough for such a ramshackle genre, skiffle came to England by accident. Chris Barber had formed a jazz band, and its new banjoist was Lonnie Donegan. They were recording a disc but had run out of songs to play. Donegan had a suggestion: ‘What about some skiffle?’
In the United States, its homeland, skiffle had already been forgotten. Unlike jazz or the blues, it was barely a genre. This was interlude music at best, a distraction proposed when there was nothing worthwhile to be played, no real musicians to play it and few instruments to play it with. Nonetheless, the other two unpacked their instruments. And then, in what has been called his ‘pseudoblues wail’, Donegan broke into ‘Rock Island Line’. No one knows when the song was written, but all agree that the songwriter was a convict, and the song is one of yearning for escape.
The song tells of an engine driver who successfully smuggles a stash of pig iron past a railway toll gate. A more American theme could scarcely be imagined, but that was the point. Not Bill Haley & His Comets, nor Elvis, nor even Buddy Holly so galvanized the British young. They were haloed at an almost unbridgeable remove from British realities. In any case, white rock ’n’ roll, or ‘rockabilly’, the music offered by Haley and Elvis, could be a curiously sedate affair; it was music for joyful or even elegant dancers. Perhaps, when the Teddy boys tore up the cinema seats, they were not so much fired by rock ’n’ roll as impatient with it. Skiffle might have been rudimentary, but it was never sedate.