Over-dramatised, over-metaphorical (‘whispers of dawn’, a car ‘easing’ itself through rain), breathless, these were the accents of the 1960s’ ‘major’ articles in the Sunday Times. It was a decade when papers, politicians and pop stars wanted everyone to know that a great deal, chiefly as a result of what they themselves did, was going on.
In old age, haggard and wistful, they still talk about the Sexual Revolution, the Pop Revolution, the revolution of technology (Wilson’s White Heat which gives this book its title): there were revolutions everywhere in the Sixties. All I know is that I was alive then, and if all that was going on, then I wasn’t part of it. I think I lost my virginity, but I can’t be sure. Appealed to for corroboration in later years, all the other witness to this momentous event would say was, distractedly, ‘Sort of.’ Which would have been a better title for this history. It was a ‘sort of’ decade.
Dominic Sandbrook’s burrowing among what people thought happened, and what did, produces some very strange facts. They are supposed to have been what the Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, a historian, called ‘the epochal Sixties’, and he should know, having kept a record of the 600 women, or whatever it was, he slept with in the course of them.
The Sixties are supposed to have been the decade of liberal reform carried out by Labour government, in particular by its home secretary Roy Jenkins, the languid aristocrat with the curious vowels, who was neither languid (he spent much of the decade plotting against his leader), nor an aristocrat, but whose vowels were curious. Sandbrook has this quote from Aneurin Bevan: ‘No boy from the Valleys who has cultivated that accent could possibly be lazy.’ I should like to bring this to the attention of Lord Gowrie, the Henry Higgins of our day.
But what I didn’t know until I read this book was how completely Labour distanced itself from such reforms, whatever they said later. Hanging, homosexuality and abortion did not appear in any of the party’s manifestoes, and in each case the legislation affecting them started as a private member’s bill. There was no government initiative. As for hanging, when it was abolished for a trial period of five years Jenkins was not yet home secretary; when it was permanently abolished he had left the Home Office.
As for comprehensive education, the politician who closed more grammar schools than any other was not Tony Crosland or his successor Ted Short: it was Margaret Thatcher. In this decade of photographers and pop stars nothing was quite what it seemed.
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