Christopher Booker

Profumo. Chatterley. The Beatles. 1963 was the year old England died

The twelve months that brought heaps of snow, satire, sex, pop — and ended with an event that outstripped all the rest

Photo by Kent Gavin/Keystone/Getty Images
Shortly before his death, David Frost rang to ask me to take part in a radio series he was making to mark the 50th anniversary of ‘the year, Chris, that I know is closest to your heart, 1963’. This was not because 1963 was the year when he and I worked together on the BBC satire show That Was The Week That Was (TW3), which overnight made Frost a television superstar. It was because he remembered the importance I had given to the events of that year in The Neophiliacs, a book I wrote long ago analysing the tidal wave of change which swept through British life in the 1950s and 1960s. By any measure the stream of scandals, shocks and sensations which poured through the headlines in 1963 made it as extraordinary a year in Britain as any since the second world war. Recent books, films and articles have recalled some of the individual events of those surreal 12 months — the worst winter for 200 years, which covered Britain in snow from December to March, the Profumo scandal, the Great Train Robbery, the explosive rise of the Beatles, Harold Macmillan’s dramatic exit from the political stage. In recent days, we’ve been treated to lots of recollections of that year’s most sensational event, the assassination of President Kennedy.
‘What’s the “Steak à la Princess Royal”?’

Leaping Beatles

What has been lacking, however, is any real attempt to put all those individual dramas of 1963 together, to show just why they made it such a watershed year in Britain’s postwar history. The reason it took up an entire chapter of my book was that it marked the moment when the ‘old order’, which had for so long seemed to be at the core of our national identity, finally crumbled, giving way to the very different kind of country that in many respects we still live in today.

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