Religious differences could still linger. In the early Sixties, the Scottish community, anxious to preserve Liverpool as a bastion of the Reformed faith and the Tory party, cried out in a pamphlet: ‘Romanism is the greatest enemy of our civil and religious liberty and if we lose these inestimable privileges for a mess of Socialist pottage we shall indeed be unworthy of the heritage won for us by our grand Protestant sires.’ However, such conflict began to ease when the slums were cleared and new houses built; the communities were no longer sequestered. Those of different confessions were obliged to cooperate.
Then there were the football fans who were, as Moorhouse observed, Liverpool’s most controversial export. ‘A strange, alien people they were, too,’ he wrote, ‘who swore more fluently and often than we did and who openly relieved themselves on the Bolton terraces, which didn’t go down at all well in that continent town.’ The Cavern Club on Mathew Street also had little to recommend it to the non-specialist. Yet it was to acquire a certain cachet and even piety of a kind.
The bouncer on the door disapproves of unexpected visitors. ‘This place,’ he observes gently, ‘is becoming a bloody shrine.’ And so it is. There are CND symbols and other daubs of paint crudely applied around the entrance. Half-way down the steep wooden staircase you find yourself stumbling into an atmosphere which is thick, sweet, almost tasty. In the Cavern something like a couple of hundred youngsters are compressed together under three low barrel-vaulted ceilings separated by stubby, arched walls … The walls are running with condensation. No one seems to notice the acute discomfort of being there.
This ‘foetid ill-ventilated hole’, as Moorhouse puts it, was an unlikely ‘shrine’ to what was soon known as ‘the Mersey Sound’.
The well-attested but elusive link between delinquency and a lack of education had long preoccupied all the major parties. In October 1963, the Robbins Report on higher education led to a flowering of new universities. These were not ‘red-brick’, in colour or in connotation. Rather they were of plate glass. They won many awards but few devotees. Yet they were quite as rigorous in their demands upon the students as any that preceded them. It was surely no accident that the iconic quiz show University Challenge was aired on TV just as the building of ‘plate glass’ reached its apogee in 1963, nor that the first university to win the challenge was the humble University of Leicester.
On 19 October 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home became prime minister, to the dismay of Rab Butler’s supporters, who felt that the natural successor had been passed over in favour of a desiccated Scottish nobleman. For its own part, the opposition was delighted. Here was a prime minister whose very appearance ran counter to their vision of a nation gleaming and galvanized. But though cadaverous, aged and out of touch, Douglas-Home had a thorough mind and was helped in his role of physician to social grievances by a courtesy and warmth rare in politics and rarer still among the aristocracy.
The inevitable election fell, and was won by Labour – the only surprise lay in the narrowness of the victory. ‘Be prepared’ is the Boy Scout’s watchword, and Harold Wilson – who had assumed the leadership of the Labour party after the death of Gaitskell – adhered to it throughout his political life. Even in the presence of the queen he could not restrain himself from harking back to his days as a Scout. Like Enoch Powell, he had spent his time at Oxford indulging in what was still considered a rather eccentric pursuit – learning. Those who had observed his intimidating capacity for work chose to recall him as a plodder, forgetting his formidable intelligence. Yet he was a member of that surprisingly common breed, the unreflective prodigy. Grand political creeds held scant appeal for him and even at university he had shown little interest in politics. He was also genuinely benign, wanting the best for everyone as long as not too much was required in the way of moral courage. In short, he was almost as kind as he was genial and almost as genial as he was clever.
Wilson was vastly aided in his work at Number Ten by his wife’s indifference, which left him free to spend the necessary hours closeted with aides and ministers. Mary Wilson, reclusive, devout and devoted to her husband, took little part in parliamentary life. Instead of doing the rounds, she composed poetry. One of her volumes sold 75,000 copies on its first print run. Whether explicitly religious or simply expressive of a vague but poignant yearning, her poems are suggestively titled: ‘The Virgin’s Song’, ‘If I Can Write Before I Die’, and a piece that might have been named by one of her husband’s more ardent critics on the left: ‘You Have Turned Your Back on Eden’.
Still, Harold Wilson needed a helpmeet. Though Marcia Williams was strictly only Wilson’s political officer, she soon became his confidante, imposing her will in matters that lay far beyond her remit and openly challenging ministers of the crown. Predictably, hints of a dalliance sometimes surfaced, but for all Wilson’s lapses into political infidelity, he was devoted to Mary. He was also a northerner, quick-witted, seemingly phlegmatic and reassuring. In this he had his luck to thank, for the north had already come to prominence with a speed that none could have predicted.
‘Did you have a gramophone when you were a kid?’ asked an American interviewer of George Harrison, lead guitarist of the Beatles. The answer came in the amused, undulating tones of Liverpool. ‘A gramophone? We didn’t have sugar.’ It was a classic Liverpudlian tease, and of a piece with Harrison’s character.
Liverpool was not quite in the doldrums suffered by Manchester, but it was scarcely a cultural hub, at least not so far as London was concerned. For all its racial and religious diversity, and its accomplishments in trade, it seemed, in the words of a contemporary, ‘utterly unglamorous’. And yet in one vital respect, Liverpool was blessed. It had access to the sea, which meant access to records and American music.
Boredom can awaken the sleepiest creative urge. The banality, as much as the poverty, of post-war Britain inspired the musical bloom of the Sixties. For there was little or nothing to do when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and the Davies brothers grew up, little at least in the way of leisure. The family could provide music, fun and a hearth, but this triad is itself suggestive that England had not only declined but contracted. Beyond the home, the world of pleasure was thin. The music halls were in retreat and the cinema was a minnow beside the whale it had been in previous years. Rationing was still in force. Children still played in bomb craters, often finding toys sturdier than any to be glimpsed in shop windows.
For those in their teens, the world was scarcely brighter. Simple pleasures, furtive transgressions, sporadic and apolitical violence were the recreational prospects to hand. The young men brought up amidst the ruins of the Blitz had nothing but a promise of freedom offered from abroad. And one could always improvise: having nothing, the young had to make. As we have seen, however much rock ’n’ roll might be worshipped, loved and danced to in England, it could not easily be emulated in its most glamorous form. Even guitars were almost a luxury item. As for drum kits or amplifiers – these items might as well have been the golden fleece. How could anyone follow Elvis on a budget of shillings?
Liverpool had a proud, if murky, past but no observable future until, as if by magic, there appeared four saviours. The Beatles arrived at the Cavern Club via a long and winding road. In the late Fifties, John Lennon, an artistic maverick of workingclass stock and middle-class upbringing, had established a skiffle group called the Quarrymen. When the polite Paul McCartney offered to play, Lennon was confronted with a choice. The younger man’s obvious talent was clearly a threat, yet it would enrich the band immeasurably. Later, George Harrison, a friend of McCartney’s, joined, with nothing but a slow, wise wit and ‘the dogged will to learn’ to recommend him. The future Beatles lacked only a drummer. Indeed, the search for a permanent drummer, one who moreover would be a true ‘Beatle’, was to exercise them for almost three years. During those years, the Beatles had served in Hamburg. Their career had been undistinguished to date. One rival even complained of the impresario Alan Williams’ decision to recruit ‘a bum group like the Beatles’. But it was in Hamburg that they became the Beatles. Forced to contend with nightly bar fights, they learned that playing music was about pleasing others, or else. When they returned to Liverpool in 1961, they were hardened and fast. The songwriting partnership forged between Lennon and McCartney seemed to later commentators a gift from the gods: a minor lyrical genius (Lennon’s) was smelted with a major musical talent (McCartney’s). Now they needed only a manager far-sighted enough to see this.