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andnogimmicks · 7 years

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The UK General Election of 1964

Warning: This post contains a racial slur, quotes from racist letters to a local newspaper, and a description of racist rhetoric.

NB: This post draws heavily on the consummate scholarship of D E Butler and Anthony King's The General Election of 1964. If my dependence on their work feels like a limitation, then I have no defence. Their account of this event is masterful, and I highly recommend the book.

Update: This post was edited on 2017-10-18 to add more documentary evidence for my claims, and a brief assessment of the Conservative campaign, and on 2017-10-21, to embellish the section on Smethwick.

Front page of the Daily Mirror, Thursday 15 October, 1964. Above is a fascimile of a black-and-white tabloid frontpage. The headline is ‘LET’S ALL VOTE TODAY’ in huge letters. A subheading reads, ‘AND VOTE FOR OUR FUTURE!’ On the left, there is a close-up photograph of Harold Wilson looking serious and confident. On the right, there is a cartoon of Conservative MP Quintin Hogg grimacing inanely with a halo above his head. Beneath him, the text reads, ‘Let us show ‘HALO’ HOGG just how many of us are ‘Stark, staring bonkers!’ This comment refers to some choice words of Hogg’s about Labour voters during the campaign.

A bit of background for the uninitiated: the United Kingdom (UK) is a state, and arguably a nation, comprised of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. UK general elections select candidates for membership of the House of Commons in the UK Parliament from local geographic divisions called constituencies. Each constituency returns only one member: the one who receives the most votes. Candidates generally belong to a political party, and a party with a majority of 'seats' (that is, more than half of the members) in the Commons forms the Government. In this post, I will give a summary of the results of the 1964 UK General Election, discuss the main events of the campaign, and focus on the election in the constituency of Smethwick, where extensive use of racist rhetoric around immigration produced a notable result.

The election took place on Thursday, October 15th. That evening, Harold Wilson's political secretary, Marcia Williams, bet that the incumbent Conservative Government would survive with a small majority.1 In the event, the competition was close, and the final outcome only became clear very late, on the afternoon of Friday the 16th. For much of the night, the results suggested a considerable swing to Labour, but this diminished over time, and the party suffered significant disappointments on the second day. The party only received confirmation of its majority with the result from Brecon and Radnor, a huge rural constituency in central Wales, at 2.47pm on Friday.2 It was not until 3.50pm that Wilson was politely invited to Buckingham Palace. At 4pm, he went to see the Queen and gain permission to form a Government.3

Image by Mirrorme22. Retrieved from Wikipedia on 2017-09-18. Above is a cartographic representation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, divided up into House of Commons electoral consituencies as used in the General Election of 1964. Each constituency is coloured with the official colour of the party which won there. Labour is red, the Conservatives are blue, and the Liberals are yellow. The map is mostly blue, as the Conservatives tended to win in the larger, rural constituencies, but the winner is Labour, which has won the urban areas of London, central Scotland, Tyneside, most of Wales, and a vast crescent of constituencies stretching from Birmingham, through Coventry, Derby, and Leicester, to the Northern industrial conurbations. Northern Ireland is entirely Conservative. The Liberals have won only nine seats, mostly in the far reaches of Scotland.

Parliament returned 630 MPs. By convention, the Speaker does not vote, meaning that only 629 seats were politicised. At the final count, Labour had 317 seats. This gave them an working majority of only five MPs, although the prospects of Liberal-Conservative cooperation were low, making defeat a less immediate threat. Labour had had traumatic previous experience of a small majority in the 1950-51 Parliament, when that administration had been tired and divided. Now the party had momentum, but it was clear to the leadership that another election would be required soon to cement the new Government's position.4

For Labour, the picture was mixed. Their 317 seats were garnered from only 12,205,814 votes, their lowest count since 1945. Turnout had decreased slightly to 77.1%, from 78.7% in 1959, but this was actually up from 1945's 73.3%, and the total number of votes cast was not much lower than at previous elections. Labour only managed 44.1% of the vote, which was up from 43.8% in 1959, but significantly less than its victory in 1945, and its losing results in 1951 (when it reached an all-time high of 48.8%) and 1955.5 Wilson had won, but only by a slim margin against a discredited regime with elderly and aristocratic leadership. Notably, Labour’s new MP for Buckingham was a Czechoslovakian-born businessman named Robert Maxwell.

The Conservatives also had their worst outcome since 1945. They won 12,000,396 votes, 43.4% of those cast. Thus the most startling result nationally was the diminution of the party duopoly which had been unassailable since the War. This was most visible in the performance of the Liberal Party, whose vote swole to 3,092,878, some 11.2%.6 This was their best result by vote share since 1929, although they had had more seats until 1950. They came second in 54 seats, which was up from 27 in 1959.7

The General Election gains and losses are updated on the scoreboard at the Labour Party HQ in Transport House, Westminster, back in 1964. Unsourced. Retrieved from BT Pictures on 2017-10-16. Above is a black-and-white landscape photograph of a large, old-fashioned election scoreboard, on which results are displayed manually, by moving paper cards around. A young woman on the right, in a smart chequed suit jacket, smiles as she adjusts Labour's net gain total. The photograph was taken very late on election night. So far, 124 results have been declared. Labour has 74 seats, the Conservatives have 49, and the Liberals have only one. So far, Labour has made twelve net gains. This trend was to continue into the morning.

As a consequence of uncertainty about the timing of the election, the campaign had been long. The popularity of the Conservative Government began eroding in 1961, when the Chancellor, Selwyn Lloyd, had introduced controversial measures designed to counter high inflation and a balance of payments deficit, including a 'pay pause' for wages.8 With inflation above 3%, the pause was in real terms a cut. The unions refused to cooperate, and drew public favour. After thirteen years of Tory rule, voters now rushed to support a more progressive vision of politics, from a party which had long been out of vogue. But their movement was not, at least initially, to Labour. Instead, it was the Liberal Party who performed handsomely at several by-elections, and rose from 8% to 20% in the polls.9 In March 1962, the Liberals stole the safe seat of Orpington from the Conservatives, and gained a 7,000 vote majority.10 Support for the Conservatives collapsed from 46.5% in early 1961, to below 35% halfway through 1962. It was in this context that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had sacked seven Cabinet ministers in one day in July, in the so-called 'Night of the Long Knives'. His new Chancellor, Reginald Maudling, drastically reversed Lloyd's policy by offering an expansionary budget in 1963 in order to stimulate growth. Production increased and unemployment fell, but it was a temporary fix; the budget required that £58 million be drawn from official reserves, and an unsustainable gap in the balance of payments now began to grow.11 12

In January 1963, French President Charles de Gaulle indicated that he would veto Macmillan's application for Britain to join the EEC, and Labour's leader, Hugh Gaitskell, died suddenly. In February, unemployment, which had been consistently low since 1947, reached 3.9%. Labour, now led by Wilson, was beating the Conservatives by some 15% in Gallup polling. It had averaged 43% support in 1962, but achieved 49.5% over the following year, as the Vassall, Profumo, and Philby revelations followed.13 His reputation in tatters, Macmillan resigned soon after, though officially on grounds of ill health, and was replaced by Alec Douglas-Home in the traditional Conservative way, under advisement from his predecessor, and without democratic input.14

Alec Douglas-Home on a day of shooting in 1964. Photograph unsourced. Retrieved from the Daily Mail on 2017-10-16. Above is a black-and-white portrait photograph of a slender, white, middle-aged man on a country estate, in plus-fours and shooting jacket, with a huge shotgun slung over his arm. It is Conservative Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home.

Labour's campaign was focussed around the personality of Wilson. Soon after his election as leader, he flew off to see world leaders, and appeased his party's flanks by criticising the Polaris programme as wasteful without committing to unilateral nuclear disarmament.15 During the campaign proper, he gave daily press conferences with himself as the star. He was noted for his wit in the House of Commons and in media appearances. He attempted to draw parallels between himself and the charisma and rising cultural liberalism of US President Kennedy, who he had met in spring, 1963,16 but according to Butler & King, his campaigning style was much closer to Theodore White's famous analysis of Richard Nixon's methods: solitary, demagogic, and consciously phased according to an intuitive rhythm only the leader understood.17 As in the 1959 election, when Labour had been dominated by Gaitskellite (i.e., Labour right-wing) revisionists, they made little mention of socialism, except insofar as it was being re-fashioned into technocracy, and no explicit attack on capital.18 Instead, Wilson stuck to his themes of efficiency and modernisation, and ridiculed the Tories for being out of date. Home, who had given up his title as the 14th Earl of Home to become an MP, was lambasted as 'an elegant anachronism', and 'the 14th Earl'. After photographs were published of Home grouse-hunting in woollen plus fours, Wilson relentlessly mocked his 'grouse moor conception' of statecraft. The Prime Minister didn't take this meekly. For him, Wilson was 'the 14th Mr Wilson' and a 'slick salesman of synthetic science'.19 Labour's manifesto, with its promises of greater social security spending, became 'a menu without prices'.20

British Labour politician Harold Wilson with his wife Mary, campaigning in South London, during the General Election, September 19, 1964. © Getty Images. Retrieved from Huffington Post on 2017-10-18. Above is a colour portrait photograph of a gathering outdoors. The camera points towards the sky. In the bottom of the frame, many people, including Mary Wilson, look towards Harold Wilson, speaking atop a plinth in the centre of the frame. He has a red rose in his buttonhole. He speaks into a microphone. The plinth is covered with a Labour poster of Wilson’s face.

The Conservative riposte, titled, in almost Wilsonian language, Prosperity with a Purpose, was launched on September 18th, 1964, but it announced few new ideas, and received lukewarm media attention. The Government hoped to be judged on the strength of its record in office.

Home's natural strength was foreign policy, and he made his main theme the nuclear deterrent, on which a Gallup poll found that public opinion sided with the Conservatives by 37% to Labour's 21%. But in the same poll, only 7% of those surveyed felt that defence was the most important issue of the election.21 Labour largely avoided the issue, although Clement Attlee was wheeled out for a television broadcast in which he claimed that his Foreign Secretary, Bevin, had never felt he needed the nuclear deterrent as backing in foreign negotiations, continuing, 'then of course Ernest Bevin was a great personality'. The clear implication was that Home was not.22

The Prime Minister's biggest problem was Wilson, who was coming to dominate the media. For this reason, he resisted invitations from Wilson and the BBC for a televised debate.23 His second biggest problem, the Secretary of State or Education and Science, Quintin Hogg (formerly a member of the House of Lords known as Hailsham), was less shy of media attention. At a meeting in Birmingham days after the Conservative manifesto launch, Hogg rather overstepped by comparing Wilson's economic planning strategy to a 'military operation', and insisted, 'demand for a military operation is the theme song of the dictator from time immemorial'.24 Just before the election, Hogg was to make another mistake, again at a public gathering. Answering a heckler who shouted, 'what about Profumo?', Hogg fumed, 'If you can tell me there are no adulterers on the front bench of the Labour Party you can talk to me about Profumo.' In Labour circles, this was taken, very hotly and with some embarrassment, as innuendo in reference to rumours of an affair between Marcia Williams and Harold Wilson. The rumours existed largely in elite press and political circles, and had never been published, except in oblique reference to a comment by Barbara Cartland in the Sunday Telegraph. Senior Labour figures believed that public accusations could blow up the whole campaign. Wilson defused the situation deftly, by implying to the press the next day that he had no need to respond, saying only, ‘one can naturally assume that the leader of Mr Hogg’s party will of course be making a statement.’25 The final word on Hogg went to Attlee: ‘it is time he grew up. He should know that when he has met with a rude interjection he does not lose his temper. […] Mr Hogg acted like a schoolboy. […] This man is a cabinet minister.’26

Cartoon by Cummings for the Daily Express on 1964-09-18. Retrieved from the British Cartoon Archive on 2017-10-02. Above is a black ink cartoon of senior Conservatives running to stop a colossal rocket-powered bomb from launching. The bomb has come loose from its moorings, and is ready to fire. It has been made to look like Conservative MP Quintin Hogg, and has Hog Bomb, with a large H, emblazoned on the front. Great puffs of hot air spurt from Hogg's mouth. Alec Douglas-Home and Rab Butler are grimacing and pointing to the rocket. Beside them, Reginald Maudling is throwing a lassoed lifesaver in vain. Together they shout, 'Good Heavens! Our Doomsday Weapon has broken loose!' Hogg was an effective anti-Labour mobiliser, but made himself a spectacle during the campaign, on account of his temper and unpredictability.

Even the reprisals of a well-loved elder statesman were not enough to stop Hogg. The following video was filmed at a press conference on the final Monday before the election, just after Hogg had dismissed the Liberals as an insignificance. In it, you can hear him celebrating the much-reviled recommendations of cuts to the railways made by Dr Beeching, pronouncing 'loss' apparently with an r in it, as only a reactionary, anachronistic aristocrat can, and calling Labour voters 'stark, staring bonkers':

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Labour's front bench could err too. It emerged in the Sunday Express that the the Deputy Leader, George Brown, may have suggested that interest rates on mortgages be dropped flatly to 3% under a Labour Goverment. The Tories seized the opportunity, asking how much this new policy would cost. Labour was forced to issue climbdown statements, simply saying that they wanted to lower the cost of housing. The incident ended up being understated, but it followed feverish expectation of damaging outbursts from Brown in the press and the Conservative Party.27

Cartoon by Illingworth for the Daily Mail on 1964-09-21. Retrieved from the British Cartoon Archive on 2017-10-02. Above is a black ink cartoon of Alec Douglas-Home and Reginald Maudling smugly grinning from inside a building. They watch from the window as a blank and unknowing George Brown walks by with his coat and briefcase. Home is holding a newspaper. The headline is 'QUINTIN HOGG IS LABOUR'S SECRET WEAPON'. He looks over his reading glasses and says, 'AND IF I'M NOT MISTAKEN, THERE GOES OURS'. If Hogg was embarrassing the Conservatives as a fulsome reactionary, Brown, a known alcoholic prone to emotional displays, was also a liability for Labour.

Wilson himself made only one significant gaffe in the whole campaign. With a fortnight left before the election, the motor component manufacturer Hardy Spicer was hit by industrial action. Uncalled stoppages at the plant endangered the production chain elsewhere in the automotive industry, suggesting that the Leader could not competently manage the unions. Labour was down slightly in the polls. Wilson suggested that the action may have been politically motivated, prompting mockery from the Government. Maudling memorably joked, 'I must say that's a rum one: Tory shop stewards sabotaging Mr Wilson's election! Really!'28 More broadly, criticisms were made of Wilson’s presidential style, and tendency to eclipse his senior colleagues on the Opposition front bench. He was characterised as a ‘one man band’ by his enemies in the press, but his supporters had grievances, too. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, at this time secret speechwriter and confidant to Wilson, grumbled in his diary just ten days before the election that 'he is certain that he is the one that is winning the campaign for us single-handed and I don't think he quite believes that he can be doing anything wrong.'29

Cartoon by Illingworth for the Daily Mail on 1964-09-29. Retrieved from the British Cartoon Archive on 2017-10-01. Above is a black ink cartoon of Harold Wilson clandestinely handing news of the Hardy Spicer strike to a dissheveled, quizzical George Brown. Wilson whispers, 'They're all in this Tory plot George - Hardy Spicers, Goldwater, Mao Tse-tung AND the Meteorological Office.' Wilson's suggestion that the Hardy Spicer action was conspiratorial drew much derision in the election campaign. Trade union officials are not known for their loyalty to the Conservative Party. Mao Tse-tung, the Communist Chinese premier, was frequently linked to conspiracy theories at the time. Barry Goldwater was the right-libertarian 1964 Republican candidate for the US Presidency, known for his virulent anti-union stance.

The Tories were in for more missteps. In an extended interview broadcast on the BBC, while discussing his proposal for a supplementary payment to older pensioners, Home called the payment a ‘donation’. Critics of the Government saw this slip as symptomatic of a wealthy, condescending elite which resented the less privileged.30 But perhaps the most decisive reason for the Conservatives’ loss was the most critical issue of the election: competence in the management of the economy. On the 30th of September, figures were released showing that the balance of payments deficit had ballooned to £73 million. The painful repercussions of Maudling’s gamble were now plain to see. Attempting to needle Labour on economic management, their traditional perceived weakness, Maudling’s predecessor Selwyn Lloyd insisted they promise not to devalue sterling to balance the deficit, as they had done in 1949. Lloyd claimed that in that year, Labour had been ‘faced by a similar crisis’.31 So a senior Tory, and a former Chancellor, conceded implicitly that Britain’s economy was now in crisis. It was a coup for Labour.

Despite the mistakes and the national narrative of loss, there were victories for the Tories in the election. In several constituencies, they diminished Labour’s majority, or defeated them completely. In Eton and Slough a 0.1% majority for Labour became a 0.1% majority for the Conservatives. In Birmingham Perry Bar, Labour lost their 0.5% majority to a 0.8% Tory one. The Labour vote also diminished from a 5.4% to a 4.7% majority in Southall. But the most spectacular coup of all was the Tories’ unseating of a member of the Opposition front bench in Smethwick. Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker lost his majority of 9.4%, and the Tories won by 5.0%, or 1,774 votes. The reason for these apparently unexpected outcomes is simple to relate. Slough and Southall are on the suburban outskirts of West London, and Perry Bar and Smethwick are part of Birmingham. Greater London and the urbanised West Midlands were very densely populated areas, and they had the largest immigrant populations in Britain in 1964. In these constituencies, in the context of rising house prices and growing housing shortages, local Conservative candidates ran coded campaigns, often insinuating offensive slurs or alluding to stereotypes, and designed to appeal to racist white voters anxious about housing and poverty. It worked.32

Smethwick, which at the time was technically in Staffordshire, was a suburban town which employed workers in the metal-working and car part industries. By 1964 it had a major housing shortage, and many local residents had faced redundancies, contract terminations, or real-terms pay cuts, due to foundry closures.33; 34; 35 Smethwick had been represented in Parliament by Labour MP Oswald Mosley from 1926 to 1931, before his conversion to fascism. Smethwick contained an estimated 4,000 to 7,000 immigrants, who were mostly from India or the West Indies, and moved to Smethwick to work in the foundries.36 (In 2017, Birmingham is still home to a large Indian-descended Sikh population.) In the 1960s, growing racism had led to the institution of ‘colour bars’ (bans segregating the use of services by race) in pubs, societies, and shops in some areas. In Smethwick, the tendency was particularly strong, and local authorities had taken to charging double the normal deposit for renters of colour. Even a local Labour Club was operating a colour bar.37 In July 1961, 610 council tenants on Prince Street, Smethwick, had refused to pay their rents in protest at the routine housing of a Pakistani family in a new maisonette, after their previous house was demolished in slum clearances.38 39

The Conservative candidate for Smethwick was Peter Griffiths, a headmaster at a local primary school since 1962, who had been heavily involved in local politics before the election. He had become a councillor in 1956, and had run for the seat unsuccessfully in the 1959 General Election.40 His signature demands were a total ban on the immigration of unskilled workers, repatriation of people of colour who had been unemployed for six months, and segregation of schooling for immigrant children until they had reached an arbitrarily designed, ‘reasonable command of English’. Local feeling was deeply divided. According to the Times, the Smethwick Telephone, a local newspaper, gave over 1,650 column inches to the topic of immigration in 1963. The same report in the Times quoted two typical letters printed in the Telephone in that year:

With the advent of the pseudo-socialists' 'coloured friends' the incidence of T.B. in the area has risen to become one of the highest in the country. Can it be denied that the foul practice of spitting in public is a contributory factor?

And:

Why waste the ratepayers' money printing notices in five different languages ? People who behave worse than animals will not in the least be deterred by them.41

To those who had been paying attention, Griffiths' victory in the seat was no surprise: his campaigning, fed by this rhetoric, had recently brought the local council under the control of the Conservatives.42

Peter Griffths campaigning in Smethwick, 1964. © Express & Star, retrieved from The Telegraph on 2017-10-16. Above is a black-and-white landscape photograph of four white people laughing in front of a terrace of brick houses. On the left is a young, boyish man in a suit, wearing a suit and a rosette. The other three are much older women. The man is Peter Griffiths, Conservative candidate for Smethwick in 1964, a headmaster with a sideline in barely-masked racial hatred.

Griffiths’ style at political gatherings was notable. After claiming that he had actually intended to speak at the event on other issues, but was being forced to clarify his position by those attempting to discredit him, Griffiths would speak at length about 'immigration', a dogwhistle codeword used to disguise the speaker's racism, and advocate repatriation.43 He would earnestly protest that he was opposed only to squalor and violence against (white) women, leaving his audience to make the unspoken link between these iniquities and the presence of people of colour in the neighbourhood. Racist politics, in 1964 as now, are a matter of the greatest cowardice and cynicism. They are often communicated implicitly, or by allowing others to speak for you. Griffiths refused to condemn the slogan which became associated with his campaign: 'if you want a nigger for a neighbour - vote Labour.'44 In an interview with the Times in March 1964, he defended its use, saying, ‘I should think that is a manifestation of the popular feeling. I would not condemn anyone who said that. I would say that is how people see the situation in Smethwick. I fully understand the feelings of the people who say it. I would say it is exasperation, not fascism.’45

Patrick Gordon Walker, the Labour incumbent in the constituency, was an academic, and an advocate of closer relationships with other Commonwealth member states. He lived in the leafy and spacious Hampstead Garden Suburb, and had neglected his constituency in recent years. His image was very much that of the liberal elitist, and the local Labour party was complacent and disorganised. Rumours circulated in the constituency that he had married a black woman, or that he had married off his daughters to black men. His seat was ripe for the taking.46

In the end, Labour’s victory was slight, but it was still a victory. After being named Prime Minister, Wilson wasted no time. The first of his Cabinet appointments were announced that evening:

George Brown would be Minister for Economic Affairs, and First Secretary of State, to demonstrate his position as deputy to the Prime Minister;

James Callaghan was Chancellor of the Exchequer;

Patrick Gordon Walker became Foreign Secretary, even though he had lost his seat and was no longer an MP;

Denis Healey was now Defence Secretary;

and Herbert Bowden would be Leader of the House of Commons.47

Wilson had surrounded himself with rivals from the party's right wing. In this he had had little choice; the senior Cabinet positions were elected by the party. Privately, though, he was thinking of the future. In July, he had promised Wedgwood Benn a position as Postmaster General. But this was not a Cabinet role. He stressed that 'this was only for eighteen months.'48 This new Prime Minister, who had swept into Number 10 after not even two years as Leader of the Opposition, and defeated the most electorally successful Government in a century, was already planning his next date with the polls.

Harold Wilson toasts members of a working men's club in his constituency, in 1964. © Getty Images. Retrieved from BBC News on 2017-10-01. Above is a black-and-white landscape photograph. A group of people is applauding and cheering in a working mens' club. In the foreground, turned away from us, Harold Wilson raises a pint of bitter in celebration.

Defeat didn’t spell the end for Home. He would go on to serve again as Foreign Secretary throughout the four-year Heath administration. For the most part, he had found it impossible to compete with Wilson’s rambunctious campaigning, and he had been vulnerable to Labour’s caricature of the Tories as outdated gentleman amateurs. But there are those who defend his legacy. Douglas Hurd offers a flattering perspective in his short biography of Home. As he sees it, during the brief year of Home’s leadership, the Conservatives had climbed from oblivion in the polls, to fighting a very close race. They had moved on from several very damaging scandals. With his calm manner, Home, the honourable man, had gained ground on the scheming and cynical Wilson.49

Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London: William Collins, 2016), p. 317. ↩︎

D E Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964 (London: Macmillian, 1965), p. 289. ↩︎

Pimlott, p. 318. ↩︎

ibid, p. 319. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 303. ↩︎

ibid. ↩︎

ibid, pp. 293-4. ↩︎

Kenneth O'Morgan, Callaghan: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 192. ↩︎

Clive Ponting, Breach of Promise: Labour in Power 1964-1970 (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 13. ↩︎

Butler and King, pp. 13-6. ↩︎

O'Morgan, pp. 172-3. ↩︎

J. Foreman-Peck, 'Trade and the Balance of Payments, in The British Economy Since 1945, ed. N. F. R. Crafts and Nicholas Woodward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 168. ↩︎

Butler and King, pp. 14-20. ↩︎

Ponting, p. 14. ↩︎

ibid, p. 11. ↩︎

Pimlott, pp. 282-5. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 75. ↩︎

David Coates, The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 97. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 23. ↩︎

ibid, p. 110. ↩︎

ibid, p. 129. ↩︎

ibid, p. 131. ↩︎

ibid, p. 95. ↩︎

ibid, p. 111. ↩︎

Pimlott, pp. 314-6. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 120. ↩︎

ibid, pp. 113-4. ↩︎

ibid, p. 115. ↩︎

Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963-67 (London: Arrow Books, 1987), p. 150. ↩︎

Butler and King, pp. 112-3. ↩︎

ibid, pp. 116-7. ↩︎

A. W. Singham, ‘Appendix III: Immigration and the Election’, in Butler and King, pp. 360-1. ↩︎

The Times, Friday March 23 1962, p. 10, News in Brief: Workers Return (London: Times Newspapers, 1962) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/archive/article/1962-03-23/10/13.html [accessed 2017-10-21]. ↩︎

The Times, Friday March 24 1962, p. 5, Cyle Works Closing (London: Times Newspapers, 1962) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/archive/article/1962-03-24/5/4.html [accessed 2017-10-21]. ↩︎

The Times, Friday July 13 1962, p. 21, Improved Current Trends (London: Times Newspapers, 1962) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/archive/article/1962-03-24/5/4.html [accessed 2017-10-21]. ↩︎

Singham, p. 364. ↩︎

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Griffiths, Peter Harry Steve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004-16) http://oxforddnb.com/view/article/108299 [accessed 2017-10-21]. ↩︎

The Times, Thursday July 27 1961, p. 6, Smethwick Rent Strike Fails (London: Times Newspapers, 1961) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/archive/article/1961-07-27/6/11.html [accessed 2017-10-21]. This content is, unfortunately, behind a paywall, and can only be accessed by Times subscribers. ↩︎

The Telegraph, Peter Griffiths - obituary (London: Telegraph Media Group, 2013), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10479104/Peter-Griffiths-obituary.html [accessed 2017-10-19]. ↩︎

The Times, Monday March 9 1964, p. 6, Issue at Smethwick: Labour Accusation of Exploitation (London: Times Newspapers, 1964) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/archive/page/1964-03-09/6.html [accessed 2017-10-21]. This content is, unfortunately, behind a paywall, and can only be accessed by Times subscribers. ↩︎

The Times, Monday July 24 1961, p. 10, Council “Will Stick to Guns” (London: Times Newspapers, 1961) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/archive/page/1964-03-09/6.html [accessed 2017-10-21]. This content is, unfortunately, behind a paywall, and can only be accessed by Times subscribers. ↩︎

Singham, pp. 364-5. ↩︎

David Olusoga, Black and British (London: Macmillan, 2016), p. 512. ↩︎

BBC News, Powell's 'rivers of blood' legacy (BBC: London, 2008) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/7343256.stm [accessed 2017-10-19]. ↩︎

The Times, Monday March 9 1964, p. 6. ↩︎

Butler and King, pp. 364-5. ↩︎

Ponting, pp. 15-6. ↩︎

Benn, p. 131. ↩︎

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Home, Alexander Frederick [Alec] Douglas- (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004-16) http://oxforddnb.com/view/article/60455?docPos=1 [accessed 2017-10-21]. ↩︎

#harold wilson #uk general election 1964 #alec douglas-home #quintin hogg #smethwick #1964 #labour #conservatives #liberals #george brown #marcia williams

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andnogimmicks · 7 years

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This blog will shortly begin its real-time coverage of the Wilson administration, but I want to skip ahead a bit this morning. By this time, 53 years ago, the polls were open for the UK General Election of 1964. The first results would not emerge until after 10pm. That evening in Britain, reports were circulating of Soviet Premier Khrushchev's removal from power. He had been ousted in a conspiracy organised by Brezhnev two days previously. The scale of Labour's majority remained unclear until the afternoon of the following day, but before midnight, media commentators were able broadly to predict a Labour victory.1

Here's a youthful Robin Day interviewing the 81 year-old former Labour PM Clement Attlee on BBC1 the following afternoon. By this time, the outgoing Prime Minister has already resigned.

Attlee had enjoyed a handsome majority following the 1945 election, but had had to manage with a majority of only five seats after 1950. After the experience of War, the hardship of austerity in the late 1940s, and ten years of work in Government, several Labour MPs, including Attlee, were elderly and seriously ill, and the party was divided. Maintaining the Government's majority had been a matter of wheeling dying men from their hospital beds into the voting chamber. Attlee could be forgiven for hoping that Labour would have a little more vim in future.

Note that Day doesn't miss a chance to needle Attlee on the influence of the left, which at this time was vocal but largely sidelined in the party, and on his decision to appoint Labour right-winger and nationalist Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary in 1945, rather than the somewhat inconsistent, though also right-wing, Hugh Dalton. Attlee's response about the leftists is a little garbled by Attlee's speech difficulties. He says, 'I don't think he will have any trouble.' Day also appears to be shouting so that Attlee may hear him. By this time, he was quite frail. He died three years later.

Harold Wilson had been a member of the left-wing Bevanite (no relation to Bevin) camp of Labour in the years previous, and had been one of three ministers to resign from the Attlee administration in 1951 over an increase in NHS prescription charges. Attlee doesn't mention that grudge here. Instead, he refers to Wilson's intellectual credentials. As I intend to show, these, rather than any particular ideological commitments, were likely Wilson's defining political characteristics.

Later that day, Alec Douglas-Home was also interviewed for BBC Television. By this time, the Chinese had tested their first nuclear bomb, increasing the number of states with the bomb to five. It joined a select club including the US, the USSR, the UK, and France. This topic was a favourite of Home's. In the interview, he expresses regret that the test had not happened a few days earlier. Perhaps more Brits would have voted Conservative in view of the development. We shall never know.

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For the masochists, or the very dedicated nerds, somebody has kindly uploaded the entire evening of BBC Television election coverage to YouTube.

D E Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964 (London: Macmillian, 1965), p. 289. ↩︎

#harold wilson #clement attlee #robin day #1964 uk general election #ernest bevin #hugh dalton #aneurin bevan #video

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andnogimmicks · 7 years

Text

The Go Ahead People

A poster in portrait, released by Labour before the 1964 UK General Election. Retrieved from the V&A Museum Collections on 16/09/2017, and used here without permission. The text reads, 'Let's GO with Labour and we'll get things done.' The background is cream, with an orange border. The text is green and red, and expands along dynamic angles. The word 'GO' is large. To its left is an orange thumbs-up symbol. Labour campaigned on a platform of modern brio.

Labour published their 7,000-word manifesto, The New Britain, on the 11th of September, 1964. It was their first major domestic policy document since July 1961.1 It attempted to appeal to youth, to set out Labour's stall on education, housing, and pension policy, and it riffed on the themes of Wilson's speech at Scarborough a year before: efficiency, modernisation, and scientific socialism. It used the word 'new' 85 times. In its own words, it declared Labour policy 'on the nagging problems the Tories stupidly (in some cases callously) brushed aside':2

The imperative need for a revolution in our education system which will ensure the education of all our citizens in the responsibilities of this scientific age;

The soaring prices in houses, flats and land [...];

The burden of prescription charges in the Health Service.

The first point is a reference to Labour’s plans to expand the comprehensive schools programme, raise the school leaving age to 16, and innovate in further education. British secondary education at the time followed the 1944 Education Act, which had created a framework of state funded institutions effectively divided into tiers, the most prominent of which were grammar schools, which were selective on the basis of ‘marks’, and secondary modern schools, which were not. Labour, as part of the War Coalition Government, had supported the Act, because they believed it would increase access to education for bright working-class children.3 Thoughts about education in the party had moved significantly in the two subsequent decades, and Labour now backed scrapping grammar schools in favour of building only comprehensives with no selection.

Cummings demonstrates that 'Elixir of Youth', 28th of February 1964. Above is a black-and-white editorial cartoon by Michael Cummings for The Daily Express. Retrieved from the British Cartoon Archive on 2017-10-11. The cartoon mocks both major parties' leaders' attempts to associate themselves with youthful vigour. On the left, a grumpy caricature of Harold Wilson attempts to play all four of The Beatles' instruments by himself, as former Labour PM Clement Attlee dashes towards him, with a comically muscular physique, exclaiming, 'No need to be a one-man band, Harold! I'm taking over again'. On the right, a cartoon of Alec Douglas-Home sits in a giant matchbox and struggles with oversized matches. Former Conservative PM Harold Macmillan, also now a bodybuilder, says, 'No need to worry about matches any more Alec, I'm back!' During 1964, Labour's critics described Wilson as a 'one-man band' with no credible colleagues. Home was ridiculed as old-fashioned and inept for his admission that he arranged matches to help him understand large numbers.

Despite troubling economic developments after 1961, the Conservatives' campaign platform of existing prosperity still had considerable public credibility before the election in 1964. A Gallup poll in early October found that 47% of people favoured the Conservative Party to handle the economy, compared to only 34% for Labour.4 But the Tories had clearly failed on land reform and housing. There was not enough land in cities like London and Birmingham to meet demand for housing, causing the prices of land and homes to rise excessively. The average price for a house in the UK was £3,360: about three and a half times average annual earnings.5 (In 2017, it’s over eight times the price.) This put pressure on local authorities trying to build social housing, but also on that key Conservative electoral target: potential homeowners saving for a mortgage.6 The New Britain proposes repeal of existing rental legislation, and the establishment of a Land Commission to buy up land at below the market value.

NHS prescription charges had risen under the Conservatives, but they had been introduced in 1949 by a Labour government, at the rate of one shilling, with exceptions for hospital patients, false teeth, and glasses.7 The decision in 1951 to raise them for the latter two categories as well famously prompted the resignation of Aneurin Bevan, then the pre-eminent figure on Labour's left. Two younger figures on the left had gone with him: a junior minister called John Freeman, and the President of the Board of Trade, one 35 year-old Harold Wilson. The principle of an NHS free of point-of-use charges would cause Wilson problems in office, as we shall see.

There is also mention of what will become the EU, though it’s not quite what we’re used to:

18 months ago a Tory Government, driven by economic failure, lost its nerve and prepared to accept humiliating terms for entry into the European Common Market in the vain hope that closer contact with a dynamic Europe would give a new boost to our wilting economy.

The ‘Common Market’ referred to here is the European Economic Community (EEC). Macmillan had pushed for British entry, but was denied by French veto. The EEC was a zone in which trade restrictions (like tariffs, customs laws, and controls on the movement of goods, labour, or capital) were dropped. It has since been reworked, and incorporated into the European Union, which is a much larger judicial, diplomatic, and legislative superstructure. Britain was not yet a member in 1964.

Defence is mentioned at the end. The Conservatives campaigned robustly for the retention of the nuclear deterrent, but Labour's policy was less clear. The manifesto stops short of advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament, but insists on a 'renegotiation of the Nassau agreement' on Polaris missiles.

Labour used the manifesto to attack Conservative economic policy, which it characterises as poorly planned, with regional deficits, and causing a trade deficit and high prices. Instead it proposes regional planning boards to ensure shared growth, measures to shore up the balance of trade, and two new ministries: a Ministry of Technology, and a Ministry of Economic Affairs, responsible for central economic planning.

Harold Wilson talks to miners at Cronton Colliery during a tour of his constituency in 1964. Photograph © PA Images, and used here without permission. Retrieved from BT Pictures on 2017-10-06. Above is a black-and-white landscape photograph of three white men against the sky. The two men on the left are mineworkers. They have dirty faces, and wear casual clothes, and helmets with headlamps. The man on the right is Harold Wilson. He is suited and clean, and squinting as he poses with his pipe. The miners look at him expectantly.

The manifesto makes a lot of bold claims. It vows ‘to respond to the immense new challenge of world poverty and racial antagonism’, to demand ‘the creation of a modern road system‘, ‘full employment’, to ‘tax capital gains; and block up the notorious avoidance and evasion devices that have made a mockery of so much of our tax system’, ‘to restore as rapidly as possible a completely free Health Service‘, to encourage nuclear disarmament, and to ‘reassert British influence in the United Nations’. It also cautiously promises reform to workers' rights and social services on the condition that the economy grows steadily. (This idea that the benefits of moderate socialist welfarism are contingent on the sustenance provided by taxing a buoyant capitalist economy has represented the dominant school of thought in Labour for almost its entire life. I'll be writing about this in coming weeks.)

Labour's policy on racialised immigration also coalesces in this document. It states that it will keep Conservative immigration controls in place on the one hand, but also that it will introduce landmark racial discrimination legislation. If this sounds like progress, consider the violent real-life consequences of caps on racial migration, and the implicit white supremacy of a political system wherein both major parties are too afraid of racist voters to defend migrants. In fact, once in power, Labour was to lower immigration quotas, ensuring that fewer black migrants could enter the UK, even at a time when it made no economic sense to do so. Labour's policy in 1964 was dog-whistle politics: kneejerk electioneering designed to mollify racist voters. This section was so hastily thrown together by a cynical Labour NEC that it got to proof stage before being caught under the incorrect heading, 'Commonwealth Trade'.8

Some of these pledges turned into real policies which are still in place today. Others sound a little odd now. The ‘white heat’ enthusiasm for the encouragement of science in industry, for example, feels a little feeble, given subsequent resentment at the rise of experts and technocrats. But the manifesto must have judged the mood well in 1964, because its positive reception in the press was without precedent for Labour.9 (It was called 'bright and sizzling' in The Daily Mirror of September 14th.)10

In the coming weeks, I want to assess Labour’s priorities in Government. For now, though, this is what their vision of social democracy sounded like, just before they got started, in October 1964:

[We] must put an end to the dreary commercialism and personal selfishness which have dominated the years of Conservative government. The morality of money and property is a dead and deadening morality. In its place we must again reassert the value of service above private profit and private gain.

The Labour Party is offering Britain a new way of life that will stir our hearts, re-kindle an authentic patriotic faith in our future, and enable our country to re-establish itself as a stable force in the world today for progress, peace, and justice.

It is within the personal power of every man and woman with a vote to guarantee that the British again become the go-ahead people with a sense of national purpose, thriving in an expanding community where social justice is seen to prevail.

D E Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964 (London: Macmillian, 1965), p. 61. ↩︎

Political Science Resources, "Labour: THE NEW BRITAIN" (Keele: University of Keele, 2012) http://politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab64.htm [accessed 2017-10-07]. ↩︎

Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (London: Macmillan, 2015) p. 114. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 134. ↩︎

The Daily Mail, A window into the past: A look back into the London of 50 years ago when the sixties truly began to swing (London: Mail Online, 2014) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2618940/A-window-past-A-look-London-50-years-ago-sixties-began-swing.html [accessed 2017-10-11]. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 89. ↩︎

Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (William Collins, 2016), p. 148. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 142. ↩︎

ibid, p. 110. ↩︎

ibid, p. 190. ↩︎

#labour party #manifesto #uk general election 1964 #harold wilson #the new britain

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andnogimmicks · 7 years

Video

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The 1964 UK General Election was held on the 15th of October. Soon, I'll be posting a profile of Harold Wilson, who became Prime Minister after that election, and next Monday (the 16th), I'll post a roundup of the results. In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy this Pathé newsreel from the short campaign. It features some of the amusing also-rans from the election, including famous cricket player 'Lord' Ted, who fails to unseat Jim Callaghan (a senior Labour MP who will feature heavily in this blog), and Screaming Lord Sutch, who appears here at just 23 years old, and was better known at this point for his work in pirate radio and as a musician. Patrick Jenkin, who would go on to serve in the Heath and Thatcher administrations, makes an early appearance, and you can also see the now rather justly forgotten comic actor Jimmy Edwards, who grew his huge moustache to hide a wartime injury.

Note the Prime Minister at the end admirably giving his speech to a hostile, unilateralist crowd. The Polaris programme condemned by their banners was based on the Government's 1962 Nassau Agreement with the United States, and would be the first time the UK had put nuclear weapons in submarines. The British subs were still in production at this time. The actual Polaris missiles were on order from the US.

Four fifteen-minute election broadcasts from Labour are available on YouTube, but their quality is very poor. They're almost too quiet to hear, the picture is washed out, and the sound cuts out a lot, but you get to see very old Clem Attlee, a very young Tony Benn, and a very uncomfortable George Brown. If you'd like to see them, they're here, here, here, and here.

#polaris #alec douglas-home #screaming lord sutch #jimmy edwards #james callaghan #pathe #lord ted #patrick jenkin #unilateral disarmament #nuclear weapons #1964 uk election #video

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andnogimmicks · 7 years

Text

The White Heat of this Revolution

Labour Party politicians joining hands and singing Auld Lang Syne, Scarborough, 1963. Photograph © Getty Images. Retrieved from Kabegami on 2017-10-07. Above is a black-and-white landscape photograph of five middle-aged white people linking arms and singing, in a traditional display of solidarity, at a front podium at the Labour Party Conference of 1963. Four are men in dark suits. The first three, from the left, are Alice Bacon, Harold Wilson, and Tony Greenwood.

Part of what propelled Labour, in 1964, out of thirteen years of Opposition and into government, was the striking theme Harold Wilson chose to make the centre of his election campaign: a socialist, scientific revolution which would modernise society and industry. The theme coalesced a few months after he became Leader of the Opposition, in a speech he gave to Labour Party Conference in Scarborough, on the 1st of October, 1963. A few key phrases have reverberated from that speech, including 'there is no room for Luddites in the Socialist Party', 'we are re-defining and we are re-stating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution', and most famously, '[t]he Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices on either side of industry.'1

Wilson's rhetoric in 1963 was not totally without precedent. After Labour's third subsequent election defeat in 1959, the party had begun to descend into internecine struggle between right and left. In an attempt to promote unity, MP Peter Shore and the General Secretary of the Labour Party, Kenneth Phillips, presented a paper called Labour in the Sixties at the Labour Party Conference of 1960. The paper was, merely and rather bizarrely, 'commended' by the National Executive Committee to a conference distracted by civil war (a resolution in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament was passed that year, against the wishes of the party leadership).2 But it set the stage for a campaign dominated by the theme of modernisation, and employed the key phrase 'the scientific revolution' later used by Wilson.3

The Scarborough speech was wonderfully re-staged by an actor at the People's History Museum in 2013, with a brief historical commentary beforehand. The audio is a little weak, but it makes for great viewing. You can see how Wilson appeared to unite socialists of different stripes by giving voice to commonplace resentment at the British old boy network, and optimism about planning and new technology:

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But rifts were already emerging. Wilson's decision to ask Alice Bacon to speak at the 1963 Conference was significant. She was a key figure on the right of the party, and Wilson had historically been seen as a leftwinger. This inclusivity, an expression of Wilson's managerial prioritisation of party unity, ran the risk of damaging his good standing with the left. Tony Benn notes the effect this had on Barbara Castle, leftist and Wilson loyalist, in his diary: 'we met Barbara Castle who was almost in tears because Alice Bacon had been given a speech and she had not. She said Harold was good on the machinery but always sold the Left down the river and she would quit politics if she did not get a major Shadow Cabinet appointment.'4

Castle's words would prove to be prescient, as we shall see.

Ballots & Bullets | School of Politics & International Relations, University of Nottingham, Labour's Plan for Science: Reprint of Speech by the Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, MP, Leader of the Labour Party at the Annual Conference, Scarborough, Tuesday, October 1, 1963. (London: Victoria House Printing Company, [n.d.]) http://nottspolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Labours-Plan-for-science.pdf [accessed 2017-10-06]. ↩︎

Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (London: Macmillan, 2015) p. 155. ↩︎

D E Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964 (London: Macmillian, 1965), pp. 57-73. ↩︎

Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963-67 (London: Arrow Books, 1987), p. 66. ↩︎

#harold wilson #alice bacon #labour party conference 1963 #barbara castle #tony benn #tony greenwood

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andnogimmicks · 7 years

Text

A Portrait of Britain in 1964

Warning: This post contains an extremely unpleasant racial slur and descriptions of the oppressive behaviour and laws in Britain in the 1960s.

Update: This post was edited on 2017-10-01 to add supporting empirical data and four new photographs. It was edited on 2017-10-02 to add detail to its account of the Profumo Affair, and on 2017-10-03, to add a photograph of a giant cake. On 2017-10-12, I added an anecdote about a trapped kangaroo, and on 2017-11-03, I significantly embellished several passages of the text.

Manchester, 1964. Photograph © Shirley Baker Estate, used here without permission, and taken from the BBC on 2017-09-10. Above is a black-and-white photograph in landscape. It shows four small black children playing in the street in front of a terraced house in a poor urban area. The doorway to the house is open. In the foreground, the oldest boy, facing left, pouts with concentration as he bends to hit a moving ball with his cricket bat. Another boy, wearing a striped T-shirt, watches from behind him. In the background, two more children look on lazily from their perch on top of the front boundary wall.

During the 1950s, having endured a period of post-war economic austerity and national exhaustion, Britain developed into an optimistic and increasingly affluent society of hire purchase for domestic appliances, increased leisure time, and improved housing.1 The years following have been characterised by a loss of innocence brought on by increased media scrutiny on elites, changing British self-conception, and a new assertiveness among working people. By 1964, the buoyant mood of the previous decade was in freefall, replaced by ‘self-doubt and angry introspection’.2 The emerging society would be characterised by social conflict, technological change, and a desire for glamour and pleasure.

The shape of the stuff of life was shifting. The first American-style 'superstore' (a very large supermarket, built away from residential areas, and accessible by car) was opened by GEM International Supercentres in November 1964, in West Bridgford, just outside Nottingham. (It became an Asda in 1966.)3 Having suffered bland and limited food during extensive rationing, which only finally ended for meat in 1954,4 British people had by 1960 the fifth highest sugar consumption in the world, and new methods of production, together with the development of freezing and drying techniques, allowed for broad access to tinned goods and conveniences.5 What they ate was largely traditional British food, with no pasta or curry, and eating ‘out’ (i.e., at a restaurant) was still a luxury. Higher wages allowed many families to replace fish with chicken, beef, and pork.6 Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food had been published in 1950, but many of the ingredients she had listed, including figs, olive oil, myzithra cheese, fresh salmon, and Malaga, had been unavailable for years. Even now, they could be found only at specialist stockists in London.7 (In her preface to the book's 1988 reprint, David admitted that even as she had been writing it, she and her friends lived on a diet consisting of 'an awful lot of beans and potatoes'.8)

The Bakers & Giant Cake, CHAD 13784-13 (1965). Photograph unsourced. Retrieved from Our Mansfield and Area on 2017-10-03. Above is a black-and-white landscape photograph of five white men smiling into the camera. In front of them is a colossal novelty cake, made to look like the GEM superstore in West Bridgford, complete with car park, GEM logo, and individual cars. Four of the men wear white bakers' livery, including small paper hats. The two men in the centre are management, and wear dress shirts with ties. One man is wearing a white T-shirt. The cake was produced by Landers Bakery, in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, to commemorate the first anniversary of the opening of the superstore, in 1965.

The old values of deference and tradition were eroding. National Service was finally abolished in 1960.9 Although capital punishment would remain on the statute books until the next year, by the 1964 General Election, the last legal hanging in Britain had already taken place, on the 13th of August.10 The 1960 Betting and Gambling Act legalised the opening of betting shops and bingo parlours. Society was secularising, and slowly opening up about gender and sex. Church attendance was collapsing.11 By 1964, John Robinson, an Anglican bishop, had sold a quarter of a million copies of his book, Honest to God, which espoused a libertarian conception of morality within a framework of Christian ethics.12 More women were in work than ever before: having made up 31% of the workforce in 1951, they climbed to 33% in 1961, and would hit 37% by 1971.13 The contraceptive pill had been available since 1963, although it was not yet widely in use.14 Childbirth outside marriage was slowly increasing, and 1964 was also the year the UK hit peak fertility, at 2.94 children per couple.15 As a consequence of the high birth rate, the population was very young, dominated by teenagers and children born in the post-war baby boom.

There was a sense that the future belonged to ordinary, less well-off people. Luxuries were becoming more affordable. Fabrics exploded with colour, and miniskirts and minidresses appeared for the first time.16 The British took 34 million holiday trips in 1961, up from 27 million in 1951.17 Growing fleets of commercial jets, increased affluence at home, and economic changes abroad (especially in Franco’s Spain) meant that more Britons could now afford to travel outside the UK.18 British cultural identity had a new glamour, associated with iconic cars like the Jaguar E-Type (released in 1961), rising British pop musicians, new clothing fashions (frequently photographed by David Bailey), and films like Dr. No and Lawrence of Arabia, both released in 1962. Specialist boutiques began to appear, where the increasingly wealthy could spend their disposable income. Mary Quant's Bazaar had opened on King's Road in 1955 to sell fashionable modern clothes. Terence Conran's Habitat and Barbara Hulanicki's Biba launched in 1964. By January that year, 14.2 million households, or 84% of homes, had a black-and-white CRT television set,19 although over two thirds of homes still lacked a telephone, and refrigerators had only reached 33% of households in 1962, up from 8% in 1956.20 As of April 1964, with the launch of BBC2, there were now three television channels. Commercial television, available since the passing of the 1954 Television Act, carried [advertising for new appliances and other consumer goods](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcKuOMVcqfI.21 Doctor Who had been on air for a year, and Coronation Street since 1960.

BBC2's launch had been a total disaster. A fire at Battersea Power Station caused a power outage which left the station unable to broadcast its opening programming. A live kangaroo, which the studio had borrowed from London Zoo, was trapped in a lift. Eventually, some highly awkward and hastily assembled news footage was shown, but to save face, BBC2 relaunched the following night, with a quick sight gag about using a candle to light the studio. The first night's amateurish footage, having been thought lost for decades, was discovered in an archive in 2003. Here's some brief clips from the first night and the relaunch, from YouTube:22

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Working- and middle-class people were more visible in public life. British pop acts like The Beatles and The Kinks were world-famous. A new generation of working-class playwrights had emerged, focussed on social realities, including John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Harold Pinter, and Arnold Wesker. In 1963, a 17 year-old working-class boy from Belfast named George Best made his First Division debut for Manchester United. Since 1948, 2.2 million social homes had been built.23 Although not everyone was satisfied with their new flats and houses, living conditions broadly improved as slums had been cleared on a huge scale. With the exception of 1947, unemployment had been consistently low (under 2.6%) since 1940.24 Smaller cars like the Mini were less expensive to buy and run than their predecessors. The young adults of 1964 were the first generation to grow up with the unconditional support of a healthcare system which was free at the point of use, under the shadow of the NHS, set up in 1948.

Minnie Caldwell (left), Ena Sharples (centre), and Martha Longhurst (right), famous Coronation Street characters in the 1960s, undated. Photograph unsourced, used here without permission, and taken from the Coronation Street Blog on 2017-10-01. Above is a black-and-white photograph in landscape. In it, three middle-aged working-class white women sit in an urban pub, with three drinks in half-pint glasses, and very sour, conspiratorial looks. All three women wear distinctive headgear. The one in the middle is wearing a hairnet.

But progressive social change was not universal. Britain remained a prison of sexual and gender conformity. The Homosexual Law Reform Society was founded in 1958 to campaign against the continuing illegality of sexual activity between men, but queer people were still overwhelmingly deeply closeted.25 Abortion was against the law. Those who found themselves unexpectedly pregnant were forced either to carry the foetus to term, or seek a dangerous illegal termination.26 The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937 had made divorce more easily attainable for women, but only provided they could prove their husband’s adultery, extensive domestic abuse, incest, or sodomy. Women received lower wages than their male counterparts, and were frequently sidelined in unions. Housework was, as it remains, overwhelmingly unpaid and unrecognised. And women were less visible at all levels of society. At the Olympics in 1964, only 21% of British participants, and 11% of the officials, were female.27 At the 1959 General Election, the House of Commons had returned only 25 female MPs, out of 630 seats. This was still the largest number in its history.28 The same election saw Labour’s third concurrent electoral defeat, exacerbating socialist anxieties about the long-term relevance of their political project.29

Britain's racial demographics were changing, as a result of increased immigration from Britain's former empire. Immigrants of colour came from India and Pakistan, the West Indies (especially Jamaica, and these in particular are remembered as the Windrush Generation), and Commonwealth realms in Africa. Many did low-paid, low-status work in the centres of cities like Bradford, Birmingham, and London.30 Mainstream attitudes to race were explicitly prejudiced, although the numbers of immigrants remained relatively low, at 800,000 (including white migrants) in 1964.31 White people were unafraid to use slurs or make people of colour unsafe. In 1958, there had been intensely violent racialised attacks in Notting Hill and Nottingham, stirred up by explicit white supremacists against black West Indian immigrants. In both cases, the violence was triggered by white disgust at inter-racial relationships.32

Politicians now began to argue openly for immigration controls and the exclusion of black people from British society. Since 1948, residents of Commonwealth member nations had been entitled to full British citizenship, but in 1962, the Conservative Government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. The new law introduced a quota for migrants of colour, among other restrictions. Labour’s leadership intially opposed the law, but came to support immigration controls, based on the perception of pressure from white working-class voters.33 During the 1964 General Election, in the constituency of Smethwick, the Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, allowed his campaign to be associated with the slogan, ‘if you want a nigger neighbour vote Labour,’34 and campaigned for the forcible repatriation of black migrants.35

One way or another, deference was beginning to give way to cynicism and individualism. Veneration for the respectable past had become deeply unfashionable. The Victorian Society had been founded in 1958 to protect and celebrate late 19th century architecture, but this was a reaction by a select group of enthusiasts to a hostile national climate. The failure of their campaign to prevent the 1961 demolition of Euston Arch, built in austere neoclassical style in 1837, was characteristic of the era. In 1960, Penguin won the right to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover, D. H. Lawrence's banned 1928 novel, in a much-publicised obscenity trial. Private Eye, first published in 1961, That Was the Week That Was, first broadcast in 1962, and the burgeoning careers of several comedians, including Peter Cook, and journalists like David Frost, constituted a new 'satire boom' in the early 1960s. In reaction against such irreverence and social liberalism, Mary Whitehouse launched her Clean Up TV campaign in early 1964, to promote respect for authority and conservative family values.

Old hierarchies and ways of making sense of things no longer seemed to fit in this new mood. The world appeared to be increasingly chaotic. In 1962, the US and the Soviet Union narrowly avoided nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In November 1963, US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At home, there was a sense of rising criminality and social stagnation. The Great Train Robbery of 1963 saw a small, organised group steal the (then enormous) sum of £2.6 million from Royal Mail. Recorded violent crimes were increasing: up from 5,869 in 1955 to 15,976 in 1964.36 Three of the killings which would be come to be known as the Moors Murders had already been committed. The Kray Twins, brothers who worked as violent crime bosses, had celebrity status, and were well known for their night club business and protection racketeering. In 1964, The Sunday Mirror furtively insinuated that Ronnie Kray and Robert Boothby, a member of the House of Lords, were involved in a sexual relationship. Though the allegations were likely true, the paper paid Boothby off to avoid a libel suit.37 The British Establishment, including the Conservative government, had become associated with sleaze and elderly incompetence, exacerbated by the comparison with the youthful and confident President Kennedy. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was a close-knit clique of aristocrats, almost all of whom had attended Eton. Of the 85 ministers in the Government, 35 were personally related to Macmillan by marriage.38

President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister of Great Britain Harold Macmillan with their Cabinet Members and Advisors, 1961. Public domain photograph by White House staffer Robert Knudsen, held by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, and retrieved 2017-10-02. Seated at the centre are US President 1960-63, John F. Kennedy (left), and Conservative UK Prime Minister 1957-63, Harold Macmillan (right). To the right of Macmillan is the earl who will soon become his short-lived successor, Alec Douglas-Home. (Seated at the far left is Adlai Stevenson, repeated US Democratic Presidential candidate in the 1950s, and the basis for Peter Sellers' President Merkin Muffley character in Dr. Strangelove, released January 1964.) Above is a full-colour landscape photograph taken on a sunny day on the lawn behind the White House. In the foreground, six suited white men are seated, and looking into the camera. Behind them are two dozen more suited white men. Most of them are middle-aged.

This elite world of corrupt cliques inevitably exploded, in a series of scandals which were to help bring down the Government. In 1962, following a series of economic failures and by-election losses to the Liberal Party, Macmillan sacked a suite of Cabinet ministers in a transparently desperate PR move satirised in the press as the Night of the Long Knives. The leader of the Liberals memorably quipped, 'greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.' Later that year, civil servant John Vassall was arrested on suspicion of being a Soviet spy. He had been feeding the KGB British military secrets for years.

These events were soon eclipsed by a much greater outrage. It emerged in March 1963 that the War Minister, John Profumo, had had sex with a 19 year-old woman, Christine Keeler, who had also been sleeping with a Soviet military attaché. An osteopath called Stephen Ward had apparently acted as a pimp, profiting socially and financially from sexual relationships which he set up between young women such as Keeler, and several powerful men. One of these men, William Astor, another member of the House of Lords, denied that he had ever met Mandy Rice-Davies, the woman he was accused of having slept with, prompting her famously cynical reply, 'well, he would, wouldn't he?'. Although Profumo appeared not to have shared any sensitive information with Keeler, the fallout from the revelations badly damaged the credibility of Macmillan's administration. In July, there was another spy scandal. Kim Philby, a former MI6 employee who had previously been cleared of suspicion of being a Russian double agent, defected to the Soviet Union. Then, on the 3rd of August, Stephen Ward (the osteopath who had introduced Keeler and Profumo) committed suicide, with his trial still ongoing. Later that year, Macmillan stood down.

Mandy Rice-Davies (left) and Christine Keeler (right) in 1963. Photograph © PA, used here without permission, and taken from The Telegraph on 2017-10-01. Above is a black-and-white photograph in landscape. It shows the heads and shoulders of two young women sitting in the back of a car, from through a side-window. The woman on the left has blonde hair up in a beehive. The woman on the right has flowing dark hair, worn down. Both are made up and dressed in glamorous, high-gloss 1960s style.

Macmillan’s replacement, Alec Douglas-Home (pronounced ‘Hume’), a member of the unelected House of Lords, was selected under contentious and undemocratic circumstances, without input from Conservative MPs, Party members, or the British electorate.39 While convalescing from an operation, Macmillan took soundings on the ability of each of his potential successors to unite the party as they competed for the limelight at the 1963 Conservative conference. Home’s announcement of Macmillan’s retirement, and his speech on foreign affairs, were particularly notable, while others came off less well. Having made his decision, Macmillan quietly advised the Queen to ask Home to form a Government. Home was a slight, mild-mannered, and affable Scottish aristocrat whose political career had specialised in foreign relations. He had been Neville Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary from 1936 until the latter’s death in 1940, and had been with Chamberlain when the famous Munich Agreement was signed. He had served as a junior minister in the Scottish Office from 1951, and as Commonwealth Secretary since 1955. Macmillan had made him Foreign Secretary in 1960. Home’s selection was controversial within the party. He was seen to lack dynamism, had previously insisted that he didn’t consider himself a candidate, and was not well-known among the electorate. The other main contenders, Quintin Hogg (then Conservative Leader in the Lords, under the name Hailsham, and Lord President of the Council), and Rab Butler (Deputy PM and First Secretary of State), felt passed over. In the event, two ministers (Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell refused to serve in Home’s Cabinet, but Butler and Hogg fell in line.40

The Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain raises his hat outside 10 Downing Street, accompanied by the Conservative politician and future leader Alec Douglas-Home, then Alec Dunglass, 1939. © Getty Images, and retrieved from there on 2017-10-21. Above is a black-and-white portrait photograph of two thin white men in suits. On the left is the elderly and moustachioed Neville Chamberlain, who raises his hat. Behind him is a young Alec Douglas-Home, smiling as he carries a box under his arm and a leather pouch in his hand. His hat is on his head.

In order to credibly hold the office of Prime Minister, though, Home had to become an MP in the House of Commons. He was able to renounce his peerage and stand for election in the House of Commons under the provision of the recently enacted 1963 Peerage Act, which had been passed to prevent further embarrassment of the Government by Anthony Wedgwood Benn (later Tony Benn). Benn had been elected as MP for Bristol South East in 1950, following Stafford Cripps’ resignation, but had been expelled from the Commons in 1960 when he inherited his father’s place in the House of Lords. He was re-elected to the seat in the by-election of 1961, but the Commons again refused to admit him, until the Government changed the law under pressure from Labour, and some of its own Members, who themselves stood to inherit peerages.41 Benn returned to the House in 1963, following yet another by-election.

Tony Benn, and his wife Caroline, after winning the 1961 Bristol South East by-election. A photograph © Getty Images, used here without permission, and taken from the BBC on 2017-10-01. Above is a black-and-white photograph in landscape. It shows a man and a woman, both white and young, celebrating outside a grand, old-fashioned building. The man, on the right, holds up a sheet of paper.

But roles weren’t only shifting for elites: the world of work looked increasingly different, and in some limited cases, a small number of working-class people now had unprecedented social mobility. The Professional Footballers' Association abolished its maximum wage in 1961, opening the door to huge salaries for the most sought-after players. A sense of the broader-scale changes in work during this period is given by the difference between the employment figures in the censuses of 1951 and 1971. Employment in raw materials production was already declining. Of 22.7 million total jobs in the UK in 1951, mining accounted for 843,000, but by 1971 it had shrunk to 394,000 of 24.1 million. The textiles industry was shrinking too: it went from employing over a million people in 1951, to only 581,000 people twenty years later. But not all sectors were on a downturn. The 1960s was the great age of the engineer and the technocrat, and the number of mechanical and electrical engineering jobs rose from 1,468,000 to 1,943,000. Altogether, though, the picture is one of steady stagnation: industry accounted for 41.7% of all British jobs in 1951, but had fallen to 37.7% in 1971.42 And there were other losses: five national newspapers folded in the early 1960s. Labour's national mouthpiece, The Daily Herald, shut down in 1964. Its former presses would eventually produce The Sun.

The spending power of the worker's wage was also changing. Average weekly earnings for men over 21 rose 34% from 1955 to 1960. They stood at £15.35 in 1961, about £313.56 in 2016 money (equating to a salary of just over £16,000), according to the Bank of England's Inflation Calculator, although the prices of many commodities have not maintained a fixed value relative to inflation. Food and fuel were becoming dramatically more expensive, but the cost of appliances and small cars was dropping in real terms.43 Eggs and vegetables became less expensive 1963-4, but the price of meat and dairy rose. A pint of milk cost at most 9d during the second half of 1964,44 which was around 70p in 2016, adjusting for decimalisation and inflation. That’s expensive, but it is the maximum reported price. (At the time of writing, I can say anecdotally that a pint of milk tends to cost between 45p and 60p in local supermarkets.) Beef was about 4s 10d per lb,45 or £4.49 in 2016. (Beef is usually priced per kg now, and varies a lot by cut, but from personal observation, a cheap roasting joint of beef can be £4.60 per lb.) The price of a gallon of petrol averaged 60.5d in 1964, or around 13.3d per litre,46 which would be 101p in 2016 money. (Unleaded petrol is currently around 119p a litre in the UK.) A pint of Guinness cost 2s 1d as of April 1964, which was around £3.80 in 2016.47 (So, depending on where you drink, the price of a pint remains roughly consistent with 1964, at the time of writing.)

Neighbours chatting in Footdee, Aberdeen, 1964. Unsourced photograph, used here without permission. Retrieved from Pinterest on 2017-10-03. Above is a black-and-white photograph in portrait. A terrace of granite bungalows in Aberdeen stretches away and leftwards, to the seafront. In the foreground, two white, working-class housewives talk cheerily together. The woman on the left is tall, with dark curly hair, and carries a handbag. The woman on the right is plump and has her hair tied up in a cloth. She is wearing a pinny and holding a basket. She is resting against a wooden post for support. (In the spring of 1964, there was a major outbreak of typhoid in Aberdeen caused by contaminated Fray Bentos corned beef. Jonathan Meades’ wonderful Off Kilter begins with an account of this episode.)

Membership figures for mass organisations give a picture of the class stratification of British society. The population stood at 52.8 million at the 1961 Census.48 Nearly a fifth of that, some 10.2 million people, belonged to trade unions,49 many of which were affiliated to the Labour Party. Labour also had just short of one million individual members. Conservative Party membership was just over 2 million, down from 2.8 in 1953.50 There are no national membership figures for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) during this period, but despite the low figure of 1,500 in 1967, opinion polls suggested that up to a third of British people supported the organisation's goals. More than 100,000 people participated in the 1961 and 1962 marches to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, and the movement’s political momentum caused Labour to temporarily adopt an official policy of disarmament between the Party Conferences of 1960 and 1961.51 At the same time, industrial radicalism was increasing dramatically. Between 1955 and 1964, 3.9 million worker days were lost to strikes per year. This was up from 2.1 million in the period 1945 to 1954.52

This was also the peak year for the number of grammar schools, at 1,298. 26% of all secondary pupils in the state sector attended grammar schools that year. The figure had been steadily climbing since 1944.53 Only 7% of state secondary pupils attended comprehensives (so-called because they combined the standards of the three types of secondary school in one ‘comprehensive’ institution); most of the remaining 67% were at ‘secondary moderns’, with a small minority attending technical or non-standard schools. Just under 8% of all secondary pupils attended ‘independent’ (i.e., fee-paying) schools.54 The newly skeptical national mood extended to views on schooling: in one example of the many contemporary assaults on British education, John Vaizey’s 1962 work, Britain in the Sixties: Education for Tomorrow, the author argued that the existing system was ‘inefficient, divided, selective, and class-ridden.’55

Of the 16.2 million dwellings recorded in Great Britain (thereby excluding Northern Ireland) in 1961, 6.9 million were owner-occupied, 5.0 million rented privately, and 4.4 million were in social housing provided by local authorities.56 (In estimated figures from 2015, of 23.5 million dwellings, 14.8 million were owner-occupied, 4.7 million rented privately, and 4.0 million were housed by local authorities or housing associations.)57

The first part of the M1 had opened in 1959. Car ownership soared from 2.3 million in 1950 to 9.1 million in 1965.58 According to the Conservative Minister of Transport, the nationalised British Railways (soon to become British Rail) was hopelessly inefficient, haemorrhaging £300,000 a day.59 It was on these grounds that Richard Beeching had been appointed as an efficiency specialist, to make savings. His first report appeared in 1963, recommending extensive line closures. The same year, the Traffic in Towns report appeared, which recommended the construction of inner-city motorways for car traffic, and use of 'pedestrian precincts' in city centres.

The M1 in 1959. Photograph © Getty Images, used here without permission, and taken from the Have Bag, Will Travel on 2017-10-01. Above is a black-and-white photograph in landscape. It shows an almost completely empty new motorway curving away into the horizon. The sky above is clement, with fluffy white clouds.

British self-conception was changing. The Blue Streak independent nuclear deterrent programme had to be cancelled due to cost in 1960, embarrassing Britain on the world stage.60 After the assassination in November 1963 of President Kennedy, with whom he had got on well, Home found himself falling out with President Johnson over continued British trade with Cuba, and powerless to stop the rise of the separatist and white supremacist Rhodesian Front in what is now Zimbabwe.61 The success of the European Economic Community, which came into being after the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and had since seen rapid growth, reflected poorly on the sluggish British economy. After the Suez Crisis of 1956, it was clear that Britain had lost its superpower status. The Empire had collapsed since 1945. During 1964, Malta became independent of the British Empire, but by then it was following the lead of a dozen other states. India and Pakistan left in 1947. Burma (now Myanmar), Sri Lanka, Palestine, Israel, and Malaya (now part of Malaysia) became independent in 1948, Sudan in 1956, the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1957, and Cyprus in 1959. Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago declared themselves sovereign states in 1962. Some of these states had joined the UK’s flagship post-colonial intergovernmental cooperation body, the Commonwealth of Nations. Britain remained one of four nuclear powers, a core NATO member, and permanent occupant of a seat on the United Nations Security Council. But the narrative of decline was irresistible. In 1945, the British Empire had ruled over some 500 million people. By 1964, the figure was under 15 million.62 Britain’s place in the world was now a matter of debate. The charitable view was that the UK was uniquely placed within NATO, UN, European, and Commonwealth spheres, and could therefore act as an international broker. Increasingly, though, Britain was seen as an ailing power, acting in the US’ shadow.

The might of the British economy and military might have been in decline, but demographic, technological, legal, and cultural changes brought new hope. Yet for all its developing freedoms, the new libertarianism had a toxic component. From the late 1970s, Thatcherites and the New Right were to market themselves as correctives for a ‘permissive culture’ which they believed had been generated in the 1960s. Thatcherite government was itself to oversee a period of rampant individualism, conspicuous consumption, and antisocial behaviour. The extent to which you believe this was caused by the lurch to the ‘there is no such thing as society’ right after 1979, or by the white-hot combustion of Britain’s traditional hierarchies during the 1960s, will depend in part on your ideological perspective.

It all feels very foreign to me. In 1964, my parents were six and five years old. My granddad owned a necktie made from Tyvek. There was no Internet, and there were no mobile phones or reality TV shows. Nobody had ever stood on the Moon. Men had dirty hands and smelled of Brylcreem. Their wives, or mothers, cooked their meals and cleaned their clothes. How much physical effort this took depended on how wealthy they were; washing machine ownership was to hit 65% of households in 1970.63 But coercive misogyny and class conformity were a way of life for almost everyone. In many spheres of life, tradition remained strong. In 1964, the top baby names for boys were largely Biblical: David, Paul, Andrew and Mark occupied the top four spots, and John, beginning its decline from decades-long primacy, was down to number five. Mohammed, the only non-traditional British name in the top 100, was now 73rd, up from 84th in 1954. For girls, the picture was a little different. Margaret and Mary, favourites since the 19th century, were now increasingly unfashionable, falling to 39th and 37th. The top four names were all new. Although Susan had also topped the 1954 poll, both it and Julie had first appeared in the top 100 in only 1944. The third and fourth most popular names, Karen and Jacqueline, had first hit the list in 1954 and 1934.64

D E Butler and Anthony King's account of the 1964 election calls that event 'the climax to a period of almost convulsive political change.'65 But the direction of change was far from settled, and whether things were improving was as yet unclear. Into this mix comes a round-faced man from Huddersfield, with a warbling voice.

Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 85. ↩︎

D E Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964 (London: Macmillian, 1965), p. 30. ↩︎

BBC, Magazine: How first out-of-town superstore changed the UK (London: BBC, 2013) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23900465 [accessed 03 October 2017]. ↩︎

BBC, ON THIS DAY 1954: Housewives celebrate end of rationing (London: BBC, [n.d.]) http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/4/newsid_3818000/3818563.stm [accessed 17 September 2017]. ↩︎

Anne Murcott, 'Food and nutrition in post-war Britain', in Understanding Post-War British Society, ed. James Obelkevich & Peter Catterall (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 157. ↩︎

Marwick, p. 86. ↩︎

Elizabeth David, 'Preface to the Penguin Edition', in A Book of Mediterranean Food (London: Penguin, 1998). ↩︎

Elizabeth David, 'Introduction to the 1988 Edition', ibid. ↩︎

Marwick, p. 51. ↩︎

Francesca Cookney, Tragedy of the last man hanged in Britain - as discovered by his son (London: Mirror Online, 2014) http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tragedy-last-man-hanged-britain-4134915 [accessed 17 September 2017]. ↩︎

Edward Royle, 'Trends in post-war British social history', in Understanding Post-War British Society, ed. James Obelkevich & Peter Catterall (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 15. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 31. ↩︎

Penny Summerfield, 'Women in Britain since 1945: companionate marriage and the double burden', in Understanding Post-War British Society, ed. James Obelkevich & Peter Catterall (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 62. ↩︎

Royle, p. 10. ↩︎

Richard M. Smith, 'Elements of demographic change in Britain since 1945', in Understanding Post-War British Society, ed. James Obelkevich & Peter Catterall (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 21. ↩︎

Fashion: The Ultimate Book of Costume and Style, ed. Kathryn Hennessy (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2012), pp. 352-3. ↩︎

Marwick, p. 208. ↩︎

BBC History Magazine, The package holiday revolution (London: Immediate Media Company, 2016) http://www.historyextra.com/article/feature/package-holiday-revolution-history [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

BARB, Television ownership in private domestic households 1956-2017 (millions) (London: BARB, 2017) http://www.barb.co.uk/resources/tv-ownership/ [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

Marwick, p. 91. ↩︎

ibid, p. 86. ↩︎

BBC News, BBC Two's 50th anniversary: Disastrous launch remembered (London: BBC, 2014) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27033129 [accessed 2017-10-12]. ↩︎

Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, Housing facts and figures: housing supply (London: Shelter, 2017) http://england.shelter.org.uk/campaigns_/why_we_campaign/housing_facts_and_figures/subsection?section=housing_supply#hf_3 [accessed 20 September 2017]. ↩︎

The National Archives, Labour Market Trends Special Feature: Unemployment statistics from 1881 to the present day (London: The Government Statistical Service, 1996) http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160106181901/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-trends--discontinued-/january-1996/unemployment-since-1881.pdf [accessed 20 September 2017]. ↩︎

The Observer, Coming out of the dark ages, (London: The Guardian, 2007) https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/jun/24/communities.gayrights [accessed 2017-10-03]. ↩︎

Marwick, p. 118. ↩︎

Celia Brackenridge and Diana Woodward, 'Gender inequalities in leisure and sport in post-war Britain', in Understanding Post-War British Society, ed. James Obelkevich & Peter Catterall (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 198. ↩︎

UK Political Info, Women MPs & parliamentary candidates since 1945 (London: UK Political Info, [n.d.]) http://www.ukpolitical.info/FemaleMPs.htm [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 30. ↩︎

Marwick, p. 133. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 40. ↩︎

David Olusoga, Black and British (London: Macmillan, 2016), pp. 509-11. ↩︎

Marwick, pp. 132-3. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 361. ↩︎

Olusoga, p. 512. ↩︎

Marwick, p. 116. ↩︎

The Telegraph, Letters shed new light on Kray twins scandal (London: The Telegraph, 2009) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/5907125/Letters-shed-new-light-on-Kray-twins-scandal.html [accessed 2017-10-03]. ↩︎

'The Land of Lost Content' episode two of Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain, Fatima Salaria (BBC, 2007). ↩︎

Hansard, Milk Prices: HC Deb 17 March 1976 vol 907 c527W (London: UK Parliament, 1976) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1976/mar/17/milk-prices [accessed 2017-10-03]. ↩︎

Gov.uk, Domestic Food Consumption and Expenditure 1964 (London: Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food,1964) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/549205/Domestic_Food_Consumption_and_Expenditure_1964.pdf [accessed 2017-10-03]. ↩︎

The AA, PETROL PRICES 1896 TO PRESENT (Cheadle: Automobile Associations Developments Ltd, 2005) http://www.theaa.com/public_affairs/reports/Petrol_Prices_1896_todate_gallons.pdf [accessed 2017-10-03]. ↩︎

Poster, source unknown, found online at http://i.imgur.com/uKwfmbt.jpg, and reportedly hung up in the Dom’s Pier pub in Donegal, Ireland. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 21. ↩︎

Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963-67 (London: Arrow Books, 1987), p. 9. ↩︎

Christopher M. Law, 'Employment and industrial structure', in Understanding Post-War British Society, ed. James Obelkevich & Peter Catterall (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 90-3. ↩︎

Population Matters, UK population growth (London: Population Matters, [n.d.]) http://www.populationmatters.org/documents/uk_population_growth.pdf [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

Marwick, pp. 88-9. ↩︎

Gov.uk, Trade Union Membership Tables 2016 (London: Gov.uk, 2017) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/616426/trade-union-membership-tables-2016.xls [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

House of Commons Library, Membership of UK Political Parties (London: UK Parliament, 2017) http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05125/SN05125.pdf [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

Marwick, p. 96. ↩︎

ibid, p. 130. ↩︎

House of Commons Library, Grammar School Statistics (London: UK Parliament, 2017) http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01398/SN01398.pdf [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

House of Commons Library, Education: Historical Statistics (London: UK Parliament, 2012) http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04252/SN04252.pdf [accessed 2017-10-03]. ↩︎

John Vaizey, Education for Tomorrow, (London: Penguin, 1962), p. 10, as quoted in Butler and King, p. 32. ↩︎

Department for Communities and Local Government, Dwelling stock: by tenure, GB (historical series) (London: Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011) http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120919161635/http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/xls/table-102.xls [accessed 2017-10-03]. ↩︎

Department for Communities and Local Government, Table DA1101 (SST1.1) Stock profile, 2015 (London: Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/627656/DA1101_Stock_profile_v2.xlsx [accessed 2017-10-03]. ↩︎

Marwick, p. 92. ↩︎

Hansard, BRITISH TRANSPORT COMMISSION (CHAIRMAN) HC Deb 21 March 1961 vol 637 cc223-343 (London: UK Parliament, 1961) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1961/mar/21/british-transport-commission-chairman [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 30. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 12. ↩︎

Statista, Percentage of households with washing machines in the United Kingdom (UK) from 1970 to 2016 (Hamburg: Statista, [n.d.]) https://www.statista.com/statistics/289017/washing-machine-ownership-in-the-uk/ [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

Office for National Statistics (ONS), Top 100 Baby Names Historical Data (London: ONS, 2014) https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/babynamesenglandandwalestop100babynameshistoricaldata [accessed 29 September 2017]. ↩︎

Butler and King, p. 1. ↩︎

#1964 #labour #harold wilson #alec douglas-home #harold macmillan #j f kennedy #jfk #notting hill riots #windrush generation #arthur marwick #hansard #uk parliament

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