The so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech earned Powell immediate dismissal from Heath, lasting opprobrium in the House of Commons and the warm endorsement of 74 per cent of the electorate. He was to be remembered as the man who had deliberately stirred a sleeping dragon, but Powell had only himself to thank for this. His speech was not just inflammatory, but mendacious. He had cited unnamed constituents feeling afraid in their own homes. He had spoken of ‘excreta’ being shoved through the letter box of an elderly white woman. A man was quoted saying that ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. It is probable that these mysterious constituents never existed. All the tokens of a mind warped by passion were in place. His friend Michael Foot, as far from Powell in political outlook as he was close to him in patriotism and intellect, reflected that ‘It was a tragedy for Enoch … a tragedy for all of us.’
Powell scorned the notion that one race could be ‘superior to another’, but logic compelled him to follow his reasoning wherever it led. His premises, however, were not universally shared. For him the object of politics was the coherence of the state and society, and many might have agreed. Many, too, would have accepted his notion of a realm united under a queen, with parliament as sovereign. But he considered this coherence or unity to be as necessary in town and village as it was in Westminster and believed that if it should be threatened, bloodshed would follow. As he never tired of asserting, it was not for him a question of colour. However that may be, his speech destroyed his chances of ever again attaining high office. It did not, however, curtail his influence on politics. Although his more apocalyptic predictions came to nothing, in the field of economics he was to prove the prophet of the movement that would become known as monetarism.
43
The soothing dark
For members of the ‘commentariat’, the early Sixties had been heavy with pessimism, even of fatalism. The Economist had noted that ‘All the political parties are going into their annual conferences with plans … to put Britain right by bringing it up to date; each promises that, like a detergent, it will wash whiter. The British have become, suddenly, the most introspective people on earth.’ It was not alone. Nonfiction presses ran almost dry with laments for the ‘state of the nation’. One of the most influential was Suicide of a Nation (1963), edited by Arthur Koestler. In this book, Malcolm Muggeridge articulated an ominous thought. ‘Each time I return to England from abroad the country seems a little more run down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier; its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier … and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.’ This mood had lifted in the second half of the decade, but it was to reassert itself. It cannot have helped that, in 1967, de Gaulle had for the second time vetoed Britain’s joining the Common Market. The Wilson administration seemed dazed and bewildered in the face of continental obduracy.
But, as ever in the Sixties, the people had their diversions. Watching the television had become something of a national sport in itself, and by the end of the decade, all but the poorest homes had their own set. And the small screen accommodated every taste – one could be stirred by The Avengers, comforted by The Forsyte Saga or amused by Till Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son and a gentle but brilliantly observed comedy about the Home Guard called Dad’s Army. Certainly, there was little to draw people to the larger screens. British cinema comprised scarcely more than Bond, pop art pretension and camp comedy. It could hardly be otherwise: by the late Sixties, funding for British films came almost exclusively from the United States, and when the quality of British film began to wane, the flow of money stopped.
One fine Sixties innovation, however, was the so-called ‘caper movie’. The greatest, and silliest, example of this genre was The Italian Job, released in 1969. Here, a plausible crook named Charlie Croker steals 4 million pounds’ worth of bullion from under the noses of the Mafia, aided by a team of very English criminals. They manage to get their stash up into the Alps when disaster strikes. The film ends with their bus leaning over a vast gulf, and Croker (played by Michael Caine) assuring the gang that he has ‘a great idea’, with somewhat frayed confidence.
For all the film’s virtues, it might have vanished had it not so winningly caught a particular brand of Englishness: amateurish, sunny and yet quietly implacable. And it represented, too, a reversion to the spirit of the early Sixties. This was not the slick, self-assured world captured in the Bond films. The times were less certain and so was the culture reflecting them; perhaps, in spite of the empty promises of statesmen, the dulled diamonds of flower power and the disappointments of technology, there existed the conviction that ordinary, traditional pluck might see the nation through. In any case, the end of American funding was not the disaster it might have been. For one thing, it led to the success of the Hammer studios. Towards the end of the Sixties and deep into the Seventies, films about Dracula and Frankenstein, witches and werewolves were devoured avidly by audiences and excoriated eagerly by critics.
Then there were the Carry On films, which in the Sixties took a turn for the bawdy. Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor and, on occasion, Frankie Howerd, starred in films where no sacred cow was left unmolested. From the hospital to the camping field, from ancient Rome to imperial India, the Carry On team titillated and tickled the audience. In a very English eschewing of the erotic, they brought back a spirit of holiday fun, with brassieres popping and zips jamming.
For those with money or taste, the theatre could still offer distraction and even intellectual challenge. Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born ‘university wit’ who had never gone to university, began to bewitch audiences with plays of punishing erudition, unabashed persiflage and broad comedy. Less ostentatious in his erudition but no less lyrical was the young Peter Shaffer, whose The Royal Hunt of the Sun reimagined the Spanish conquest of the Americas from the perspective of the compromised Incas. Such interpretations were to become his unchallenged demesne.
The great pop bands of the early Sixties were scarcely in retreat, but the hysteria surrounding them was spent and a long-delayed scepticism could at last be felt. Fleet Street, once the Beatles’ most ardent well-wisher, was beginning to roll its eyes at what seemed their growing perversity. Why couldn’t they just stick to playable tunes? Why all this cleverness? Satirists, too, were again sharpening their knives.
The musical invasion of the Sixties had been an invasion of groups. Just as the United States was the arena of individual endeavour, so it tended to be the cradle of the solo artist. Britain, comparatively more communal in its approach, represented the land of the band. Thus there were the Who, the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, and in the latter half of the decade, the Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Certain patterns emerged: the upper-or upper-middle-class manager, full of enthusiasm but short on experience, the predominantly workingclass origin of the band members, the American influence and its subsequent jettisoning.
Of all the bands, the Kinks were the most distinctively English. Towards the end of the Sixties, they began to compose wistful elegies and biting eulogies for the country, its vistas and its customs. Like many of their contemporaries, they had begun as a rhythm and blues band, but by the end of the decade they celebrated and satirized contemporary life in the cadences of the music hall and the folk song.