WORK IN PROGRESS ..Part Five
Created | Updated Oct 13, 2010
WORK IN PROGRESS.. Part 5
BUILDING A NEW WORLD ORDER
By 1944, as people around the world hoped to see the 'beginning of the end', and then in 1945 could see that the "Anglo-Saxon model" had once again found a way to come out on top, it was also the case that both Britain and the USA were committed to positions and courses that involved the abandonment of much of that freedom of manoeuvre and geographical advantage that had brought them success thus far.
Britain abandonned the English tradition of keeping the weight and power of the State to an irreduceable minimum, leaving the people with the maximum amount of freedom to exploit their traditional strengths, wisdoms and customs in order to 'make the best' of their lives. The state and not the people now became the key to the future in a still potentially catastrophic reality; catastrophic not least because the modern state, in addition to the proven capacity to launch devastating conventional world war, had now added the ultimate capacity to launch a nuclear holocaust. Moreover, the pressures that had been building up for the break up of the British Empire into new and independent states were accommodated by a withdrawal from a global Britishness to a much more insular one- much more manageable for an over-burdened and cumbrous state.
But the important global role of Great Britain in the Victorian and Edwardian eras was now better understood: and the USA could only hope to continue to thrive as the "workshop of the world" if it now took up that burden. John Maynard Keynes had been furious in the Versailles negotiations when he found that the US banks had no intention of accepting the responsibilities that went along with the Gold Reserves of the Bank of England. But Keynesian economics had been fundamental to the New Deal, and to the talks at Bretton Woods, at which the USA undertook obligations to underwrite, support and maintain the new and improved world order through the IMF and World Bank. As the acknowledged leader of the global alliance against the Axis Powers the USA also undertook the role of host and major funder of a new United Nations organisation. Once the war was over- though not yet for the USSR- the implications of these obligations for the American people were spelled out in the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, and underlined by the Berlin Air-lift of 1947-8. If not through these, then through the leading role of the USA in the United Nations 'military action' in Korea, the American public came to understand the weight of the new responsibilities they had taken on.
In 1944 some of those thinking of forging a better world might have read the new Penguin edition of Dr. Glover's 'Ancient World' and took encouragement from his section on 'the Peace of Augustus':-
"Old tradition requires that the historian shall chronicle wars and battles, and it has been faithfully done by Roman historians. Less attention had been given to what Rome replaced to the wars, battles, seditions, and revolutions, to which her rule put an end. We have to think of what happened in the streets of Greek cities...,of the bloodthirsty wars between Greek cities, of the ambitious wars of kings who followed Alexander.., while we may be sure that there were endless horrors and disorders of the same kind that went unrecorded...how much there was of brigandage, piracy and slave-raiding; to think of the habit of war, the'war-madness' of the tribes of Gaul; and then to reflect that, broadly speaking, all this ceased and peace rules, healing the wounds of centuries, restoring spirit and giving new hope to mankind...In the year 27 B.C Augustus 'restored the Republic'. Later generations are unable to see that this made any real difference in the government of the world..[But] The world accepted the Imperial system; it had indeed no choice; but, outside Rome, or certain groups in Rome, there was no wish for anything else; here was peace, and with it justice, order and hope of recovery. Among the old noble families the change was not welcome; they recalled a past of privilege, of which they were dispossessed..But once we are clear of the clubs and circles of Rome...we find acceptance of the new order almost universal." (page 296-9)
It was this Pax Romanum that had inspired Cecil Rhodes, who had a vision of the combined might of Great Britain and its Empire, the USA and Germany all wedded to industrialism, progress and democracy establishing such an autonomy that would put humankind on a path to ending "the horrors and disorders" of war and conflict. But, as usually happened with civilizations, order could only be established and maintained through the exertion of massive power within and without. And the victory of "Christian Civilization" in 1945 was not yet secure for it faced both external threat and internal subversion.
In Britain the state-management adopted in time the war, and now extended into the peace, could be presented in evolutionary terms as the logical outcome the Age of Improvement. But Macarthyism in the USA could be presented by Arthur Miller as another episode of hysterically witch-hunting. Whatever way the changes were portrayed, they were real enough: and, if previous English and American popular struggles had been against various tyrannies, these two peoples with strong traditions of the liberty of the individual now found themselves living in much more State managed and dominated realities.
Significantly, when that slim volume of pieces by Dr Huxley, a popular figure on the BBC Brain's Trust, was published in 1944, an article written in 1941 entitled "Education as a Social Function" was placed last - leaving a lasting impression of the vital role of education in the shaping of the future:- "....education is the function by virtue of which the social tradition, both in its general and in its specialized aspects, is reproduced and enabled to evolve. In includes the transmission of a common language, of a common minimum basis of knowledge and skills; of the common traditions and ideals of society, and of certain norms of behaviour. It further includes the transmission, via limited minorities, of specialized skills and techniques, craft and professional, and of certain general aspects of tradition via special elites. So from another angle education may be said to concern itself with the training of three sections within society- the elites, the specialists, and the residual mass." (page 181)
He went on to sum up "the chief changes in educational theory which have emerged in the last half-century". (a) more emphasis on its change-facilitating function as against its change-resisting function; (b) concern with the future and approximation to ideal but scientific standards rather than the past and old non-scientific ideals like those of religion and philosophy; (c) less stress on normative education imposing orthodoxy, but more stress on the scientific spirit, individual thought and development; (d) recognising the need to provide a high degree of social stimulation and social-self-consciousness, and (e) "recognition of sane relativity as against a sham universality, of the fact that education is not only inevitably conditioned by the limitations of time and place but should be consciously related to the needs of the particular society of which it is a function". (page 181-2)
The "sane relativity" that Dr. Huxley probably had in mind was the need to cope with "Living in a Revolution"; for it is very easy now to underestimate that sense of being in a titanic struggle against the scientific and technological might of Nazi Germany. 1944 that year of the start of the 'Vengeance Weapons' also saw Sir Noel Curtis Bennett publish a book sub-titled 'The History of Industrial Feeding'. That seems fairly inocuous, but ends in a blaze of hyperbole:-
"Not only has the science of nutrition made enormous strides so that we can now measure accurately what foods are necessary to keep every man and woman as fit as possible for their job, but we can go further and learn much about the effect of environment on the individual both physically and psychologically...To-day the only weapon we have against the use of science by madmen for destructive purposes is its use by sane constructive scientists for enriching and widening the life of the individual and eliminating physical and mental disorders and destructive forces. To-day we live inevitably in an industrial civilization - a civilization made possible by the enormous advances of physical science over the last two centuries. The future of civilization depends on how we make use of this vast pool of knowledge the scientists have bequeathed to us, and also of the tremendous efficiency of new techniques of investigation... To-day with the great resources of science at our disposal we still find millions starving and destroying themselves in a world capable of producing more than enough for everybody. In peacetime we have slumps and over-production producing anxiety and widespread misery which inevitably pave the way to war. The majority of people in this world are not merely undernourished physically, they are even more undernourished mentally...Education should go side by side with nourishment and nourishment should go side by side with work. To-day is the great opportunity to free humanity from bondage and increase its powers of life- individual life and life in the family and society. The industrial canteed has its part to play as a nucleus of a wider life for everybody." (page 301-303)
This idea of the social engineering and other benefits of communal feeding go back aat least to the Rule of St. Benedict, or more recently to Robert Owen's 'New Lanark Mills' experiment: and in his 1969 study of "The Children of the Dream" Bruno Bettelheim explains that the communal dining hall was regarded as the heart of the kibbutz collectives that were set up in the inter-war period.
The 'kibbutzim' were trying to build a new world, and part of the newness was the rejection of the old rigidies of the 'ghetto', which placed a rigid template of family life and gender roles. Kibbutz living was to be more natural with women treated in a much more egalitarian fashion, and hence entitled to a social and sex life. The pioneers had worked hard, played hard, and fought hard against Arab attacks. But this left very little time for parenting so, as in a number of experiments of the period, they had adopted the process of bringing up the children as collective groups- the next generation would have a sense of peer cohesion that tended to outweigh, or at least counter-weigh, the traditional impact of the Jewish extended family. And when Bettelheim had the chance to stay in and study a kibbutz in 1964 the resulting sense of generational gap was very palpable.
The 'Children of the Dream', he found, were very aware of the 'great adventure' that their parents had lived. How they had broken away from their roots, come as pioneers, and had built their community out of nothing. They were great and admirable, and all that was left to the new generation was to settle down into a new conformity and reap the harvest in the same kind of monotonous and hard-working life that their parents had fled from. For the founders, sprung from generations of 'ghetto' dwellers in Central Europe, even if some had spent some time in the New York 'ghetto', living off the land was part of the collective dream of the age. For the next generation it was all that they had known. But to some extent this was the common experience of those who grew up in the aftermath of the "Finest Hours" of their parent's and grandparent's generations.
Bettelheim quoted David Rapaport who said- "The upbringing of children in the agricultural collectives in Israel is for the social scientist what an 'experiment in nature' is for the natural scientist." And to some extent much the same could be said for the upbringing of children in the post-war world, for they were at the very heart of a collective desire to build what Eric Hobsbawm called "The Golden Age".
THE CHILDREN OF THE ASHES
Parents did their bit, as in the "battles for births" in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Whatever the precise connection in biology between fighting and procreation, the post-war baby-boom showed that it was real enough; and for grand-parents and parents whose lives had been blighted by the horrors of two world wars, and various catastrophes in-between, the new life brought its eternal promise. "Lord now lettest though thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation" said an old man when he saw the boy Jesus on his first visit to the Temple at Jerusalem: and the writer's mother would often recall how total strangers would stop her out shopping and admire her beautiful baby (born 1944) or how he entertained everyone on the country bus as a toddler singing endlessly "Bears eat oats and does eat oats But little lambs eat ivy. A kid'l eat ivy too. Wouldn't you."
During "Darkest Hours" people had made a point of looking for "the silver lining", and now there was a real, palpable and lively future potential, which was grasped and nurtured by the collective that undertook to care for this new generation "From the cradle to the grave". In the USA of the Sixties Bruno Bettelheim juxtaposed the kibbutz solution with the American problem of the slum child. "Can such children, if they continue to live in the slums, still learn to become citizens who will for ever do away with the very conditions that bred them? Or does a better life for them depend upon their removal from the slums in their formative years?" (page 15)
Slum clearance and rehousing policies had been part of British politics since the 1860's: but the Thirties had seen a great increase in slum clearance and this went on apace after 1945. Council estates were equipped with the all important communal halls, where occasional special meals could be housed and which could serve as the heart of new would-be communities. But the real heart of the community was its school, and it was through the school that people, who had nothing to do with the family, made sure that children were well fed- especially those entitled to free meals, that they were properly and decently clothed, clean and presentable, and had regular medical checks to make sure that they were developing healthily. It had become axiomatic that "our children are our future".
But, though less dramatically than "The Children of the Ashes" of Hiroshima, studied in a book of that title, all of the global post-war baby boom confronted to some degree that same dichotomy between the almost desperate hope for a future of love and happiness that surrounded them and the catastrophic legacy of the period from 1914 to 1945. They were projected towards a better future, if the world got that far, for they could sense -even if only subconsciously- that outside of the "Happy Days"/ Walt Disney kind of world that they were supposed to be living in, daily reality both at home, nationally and internationally was often very different.
For a start the strains on family life that had been such a feature of the industrial revolution of the steam and factory age had continued; and in many ways had got worse through the strain placed by both war and peace. Back in the early 1920's Millicent Garrett Fawcett gave up the leadership of the Women's Movement after many decades over the proposal to support Family Allowances being paid directly to mothers, cutting out their fathers. This would, she argued, weaken the all- important partnership between the parents. The first Labour Government introduced the measure in 1924, and after 1945 with the creation of the Welfare State the success of the partnership of husband and wife became even less crucial. The state would provide for mothers and children. Perhaps it was just as well; because many marriages and relationships broke down from the impact of the war and its aftermath: and many children were not even the result on any kind of settled relationship. Nevertheless , given the state of divorce law, many children were brought up in loveless homes and worse.
Historically, however, these were days of "You've never had it so good": and it was possible for Professor Beer of Harvard University to postulate in 1961 that Britain was now such an effectively managed enterprise that two party democracy was effectively dead. As he explained, the work of the Attlee Government achieved all of the programme and goals set out by the Labour Party in the election of 1918 within the space of a few years. A crisis came in April 1951 when Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson split the Party on the issues of funding the British participation in the Korean War and introducing prescription charges into the National Health. Professor Beer saw this in a positive light, since it had brought the Conservative Party back in to power; and statistically this seemed to be the "natural party" of government in the twentieth century. In future government would be a question of managing single issues, he thought.
But management on this scale was very much new territory and there had been no "long pilgrimage", merely the exceptional war time expedients during two World Wars, when the deficiencies and inefficiencies were covered over not least by a "paying whatever it costs" approach. For some in "the establishment", of course, there had been that huge experiment in government that had been the British Raj; and some had maintained for a long time that the Indians lacked the genius for being ruled possessed by the English. Now the value of the "Raj" methods would be proven in the UK.
In fact Fifties Britain became associated with wild-cat strikes be-deviling British industry, 'closed shops', sending to Coventry, and a wider culture of angry young men and rebellious teenagers.
It might have been interesting had Jackson and Marsden had looked at the attitudes to school and establishment culture of those who were generally described as having "failed the eleven plus". Perhaps working class culture thought that taking young people out of the Labour market, as well as many of the women, was worth it if it meant full employment. Perhaps the same could be said of the two years compulsory military service that offered young men the chance to measure themselves against the standards of Britain's military tradition. Because all this time there was the shadow of minor wars and conflicts, UN peace-keeping missions and the threat of escalation into nuclear holocaust.
But the post-war generation were still teenagers on that crisis day during the Cuba Missile Crisis when the "masters of war" might have pushed the button and made it the last day for life of Earth. And soon enough the American branch of that generation was confronted with the long agony of the war in Vietnam.
So, in many ways, it was potentially at least another "Lost Generation". But they found each other and that changed everything. The post-war politics of expanding leisure, consumerism, and education throughout the recovering 'developed world' provided young people around the world with similar new opportunities to come together and to discover common ground as never before. In the face of all the mass of science and technology young people rediscovered the charm of folk cultures and almost simultaneously the way that various folk influences had blended in the American melting pot to produce new "pop" music for the times. Wherever two or three were gathered together, the act of gathering in itself created a dynamic, a learning experience and a collective self-belief. Many of the Sixties Generation embraced the spirit of open-minded enquiry in the pathless land promoted by many thinkers and writers during the inter-war period. It was a great age of students as many countries had set out to produce larger university and college educated elites. And not all students were within formal education.
Having been brought up in a carefully managed reality, many from all branches of the 'student body' were not prepared to stay within the 'tramlines' laid down by "the establishment". Already the inter-war period and the Second World War had made globalisation a reality and input was increasingly welcomed from cultures around the world. In 1946 Paramahansa Yogananda published his "Autobiography of a Yogi in which he wrote:-
"The great masters of India who have shown keen interest in the West have well understood modern conditions. They know that, until there is better assimilation in all nations of the distinctive Eastern and Western virtues, world affairs cannot improve. Each hemisphere needs the best offerings of the other.
In the course of world travel I have sadly observed much suffering: in the Orient, suffering chiefly on the material plane; in the Occident, misery chiefly on the mental or spiritual plane. All nations feel the painful effects of unbalanced civilizations. India and many other Eastern lands can greatly benefit from emulation of the practical grasp of affairs and material efficiency, of Western nations like America. The Occidental peoples, on the other hand, require a deeper understanding of the spiritual basis of life, and particularly of scientific techniques that India recently developed for man's conscious communication with God.
The ideal of a well-rounded civilization is not a chimerical one. For millenniums India was a land of both spiritual light and widespread material prosperity. The poverty of the last 200 years is, in India's long history, only a passing karmic phase. A byword in the world century after century, was "the riches of the Indies".." (page 557-8)
It was Yogadanda's book that inspired George Harrison's interest in Indian culture, and through him the Beatles , and many others . But the Sixties generation also looked back to writers, thinkers and artists from the inter-war period whose work reflected that post-deluge conviction that much in the existing dominant civilization needed to be challenged, or at least looked at in a different light. Bob Dylan went back to the style of the American singer who charted the Depression Years, Woodie Guthrie, and wrote songs for the new age when answers were 'Blowin in the Wind'. He spoke for many when he sang 'The times they are a'changin .. your old road is rapidly fadin, get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand."
Among many songs that went right to the heart of the dynamics of that time one might pick out Graham Nash's "Teach Your Children Well" (1970)
"You who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by.
And so become yourself
Because the past
Is just a goodbye.
Teach your children well
Their father's hell
Will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks
The one you'll know by.
And you of tender years
Can't know the fears
That your elders grew by
And please help them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die.
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you you will cry
So just look at then and sigh
And know they love you."
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
It was a generation that could not accept that:- "The only weapon we have against the use of science by madmen for destructive purposes is its use by sane constructive scientists for enriching and widening the life of the individual and eliminating physical and mental disorders and destructive forces". Nor that the future was in the hands of a small international confederacy that made up an intellectual elite. Nor that a merely national culture as envisaged by Matthew Arnold, and reprised by Jackson and Marsden, would suffice in this global age. For art and creativity showed a power to cross boundaries as a form of human expression that was much more universally empowering than verbal of numerical language. The power to touch and to be touched was palpable , and perhaps the essence of the mood of the times was best summed up in the sub-title of Dr.E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Really Mattered." [1973]
There had to be more to life than this discourse of catastrophe and disaster, and there had been those like Arthur Miller and Albert Camus, who had been trying to feed Greek Hellenism back into the world, while teachers had thrown out the challenge to many of trying to aim for those classic values of Renaissance Humanism and "The Universal Genius" like Leonardo da Vinci, who could master both art and science. The modern popular art of the cinema highlighted the struggle between man and machine in a great deal of science fiction, while Charlton Heston's portrayal of Michelangelo in "The Agony and the Ecstacy" reminded everyone of what heroic individualism could achieve.
Amidst a great enthusiasm for "mental nourishment" "Tarka: The Otter" was reprinted in 1965 and again in 1969. But this was a new age and time for a new story. In the mid-Sixties Richard Adams set off with his family on a long drive to Stratford Upon Avon. On the way 'Father Adams' told a rabbit story to help his children to pass the time. Subsequently he wrote it into a novel, and "Watership Down" was published in 1972. It is the story of the odyssey undertaken by a group of rabbits, who flee from the heartless destructivity of modern development blighting the land. Passing through various adventures, including one when they are invited to stay in a seemingly very secure and well-managed warren, they end up living the good and simple life in an English peace on a hilltop at a safe distance from the world of catastrophe and disaster. Here firm friends of one heart could prosper and at the end could look back at what they had done and what they would leave behind, and see that it was good.
"Watership Down", like "Tarka" more than forty years before , caught the tide of the public imagination as the Sixties generation lit up the modern world with hope and expectation that it would still be possible to build a world in which people mattered. The reality of Living in a Revolution was vividly portrayed in the film version of Doctor Zhivago: and in a key moment in the story Omar Sherif and Julie Christie are almost like the Adam and Eve of a new world living isolated in a winter wilderness, with Julie Christie reminding the world of the strength, resourcefulness and courage of womanhood. But a more important inspiration was the great 1963 March on Washington and Dr Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech.
Any event in the major capitals of the world was likely to have to meet the criteria of those who 'managed' affairs: and the Washington March, and the great meeting at its end, were organised in close cooperation with John and Robert Kennedy. They wished to show the strength of support for their civil rights initiatives. But there was last minute controversy over the text of the speech submitted by John Lewis, the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Condemning the Kennedy civil rights bill as "too little, and too late", he went on " We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation...Which side is the federal government on?..The revolution is at hand..If any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about...We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way that Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground- nonviolently. We shall crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy." (pages 281-2)
In the end Lewis agreed to a different text; and delivered his speech with two Kernnedy aides ready to 'pull the plug'.
Dr King, however, did not meet with that fate, when he deviated from his prepared speech. As David Garrow put it: "The massive rally was a powerful and joyous scene, with both speeches and musical presentations evoking fervent emotional response. The program was well along before King's turn came to speak, and he moved forward carrying his prepared text. "I started out reading the speech,"he recalled in a private interview three months later, and then, "just all of a sudden- the audience response was wonderful that day - and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used- I'd used it many times before, that thing about 'I have a dream'- and I just felt that I wanted to use it here. I don't know why, I hadn't thought about it before the speech.' So he dispensed with the prepared text and went on extemporaneously. He had used the same peroration previously..but on this warm August afternoon, standing before tens of thousands of people, the words carried an inspirational power greater than many of those present had ever heard before." (page 283)
Here on the steps of the Washington Monument eighteen years after the end of the Second World War someone was able to become the mouthpiece for the values towards which the post-war baby-boomers had been struggling out of darkness and towards light:- "When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children- black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestant and Catholics- will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the olf Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last: thank God Almighty, we are free at last." (page 284)
But such raised voices could only confirm that the road to the Promised Land must lead away from a global inheritance that left too much of its mark on those who had lived too long in unsure times. In his autobiography "Timebends" Athur Miller describes how in a time of uncertainty he was probing for his own way forward as a writer:-
"Another of these unfinished probes of 1950 was the story of a group of research physicians employed by a wealthy pharmaceuticals maker who inspires them to important discoveries while suborning them to his business interests, subtly taking over their very wills as he strokes their ambitions. Aternately mocking his crude commercialism, and sucking up to him, they typify what I then saw as the captive artist-creator.
Into their midst comes the mistress of Dr. Tibbets, Lorraine, a character modeled rather distantly on Marilyn, whom I still barely knew. With her open sexuality, childlike and sublimely free of ties and expectations in a life she half senses is doomed, she moves instinctively to break the hold of respectability on the men until each in his different way meets the tragedy in which she unwittingly entangled him- one retreats to loveless and destructive marriage in fear of losing social standing; another abandons his family for her, only to be abandoned in turn when her interests change. Like a blind, godlike force, with all its creative cruelty, her sexuality comes to seem the only truthful connection with some ultimate nature, everything that is life-giving and authentic. She flashes a ghastly illumination upon the social routinization to which they are all tied and whicch is killing their souls- but she has no security of her own and no faith, and her liberating promise is finally illusory.
Behind the whole story stands an idealistic image of the humane role they had originally believed their science to play, a redemptive power they no longer have the strength and faith to grasp. They have matured into the ego-time when there is no ideal that cannot be seen through, no belief that can fill its adherents with creative hope in a culture that has prized man's sexuality from his social ideals and made one the contradiction of the other.
The play remained unfinished because I could not accept the nihilistic spiritual catastrophe it persisted in foretelling. That is, I believed it as a writer but could not confess to it as a man. I could not know, of course, that in coming years I would live out much of its prophecy myself." (page 326)
When Miller got to know Marilyn much better, he discovered in her a rare talent for instantly identifying within a crowd anyone else who had shared her experience of an abandonned and loveless childhood. But Miller and Monroe, the couple, were both "captive artist-creators" trying to make their way in an industry that was powered by "crude commercialism" and "sucking up". And yet, as Miller recounts, the press could turn on Marilyn viciously as they did one day when she was coming home 'out of character'. They hunted her down and the next day the front pages exposed "the most beautiful woman in the world?" looking plain, desperate and bedraggled amidst a pile of dustbins. And the UnAmerican Activities Committee turned on Miller.
Miller describes how Marilyn "had come to give moral support during the last days of the hearing ..It had never been easy for me to share trouble- weakness- with a woman, just as my father had always kept bad news to himself. and..this stoicism had seemed like strength. Something like fear was filling her up at my closing myself off. I was protecting a wound, defensively turning inward, but she glimpsed herself an unwanted wife...Like a child, like me, she wanted to dissolve the boundaries of her mind and body in another person, in the world, and I had seemed to throw her back on herself"(page 412)
As an old friend, who had studied psychology pointed out to Arthur Miller, what Miller and Monroe had in common was their conscience- a sense of guilt and inadequacy that left them unable to accept a state of perfection, or believe that they deserved it. As in the title of one of Marilyn's last pictures they were "Misfits".
Before the Committee procedings had started, Miller's mother and Marilyn had come to see him off:- " My mother actually succeeded in pretending nothing ominous was happening and talked about Marilyn's clothes, which I thought made her seem insensitive in Marilyn's eyes. She had a complicated and fluctuating relation with older women, veering from sentimental idealization to black suspicions that they disapproved of her. She had been sentimentalizing my mother, but now there was a suggestion of an undertow in her feeling, a dark negative pull. Still, when I turned on the platform stairway and waved a final goodbye, they were arm in arm and seemed a pair." (page 405-6)
But if Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe somehow came to exemplify the aspects of the Fifties, John Lennon and Yoko Ono exemplified aspects of the Sixties. In this instance Lennon was the great media idol, who had become commodified and had, in that phrase of Winston Churchill, the press either at his throat or at his feet. In fact by his own testimony John Lennon had really 'lost it' for some years before he met Yoko Ono.
The Beatles had just got together in their teens writing "Northern Songs" and thinking that earning a living making music in a growing entertainment industry would be better than most other futures open to them. The best times were when they got the chance to play for hours and 'work an audience',as they did in Hamburg. But like Miller's pharmaceutical chemists they needed capital and management in order to really develop the full potential of the particular kind of music that they were developing. So they had to become a brand, a commodity that could be mass-produced and rolled out over the world. Nevertheless, it took everyone by surprise just how much a global audience responded to the Beatles. As John Lennon recalled, they had started out wanting to be Goffin and King, then Eddie Cochran- "and finally we arrived a wanting to be bigger than the biggest- and that was Elvis." (page 22)
They achieved this when they went and 'conquered' the USA. But Elvis had been groomed in the same glamour tradition as Marilyn Monroe. And just as the Beatles knew all about the way that Hollywood Sex Goddesses had come along to turn on everyone- including the pubescent boys they all had been- the Beatles found that their mass audience was heavily weighted towards pubescent girls, who filled the massive stadium concerts with a deafening wall of sound in their hysteria and idolatory. The sound systems of the period could not drown out the crowd noise, so the Beatles lost even any awareness of their own performance, or, perhaps more significantly, the kind of audience response that had so moved Martin Luther King.
A new generation was growing up since the years of catastrophe and austerity- an age of affluence or the dream of it. Later on, when the Beatles were aware that they had more material wealth than they could ever need, and yet, because of that, knew that materialism was not enough for humankind, John Lennon could look back on their Apple experiment after the death of 'the fifth Beatle' Brian Epstein- their manager/Svengali.
"Apple was a manifestation of Beatle naivety, collective naivity. We said,' We're going to do this and help everybody'...and we got conned on the subtlest and bluntest level. We really didn't get approached by the best artists, we got all the XXXX from everywhere else. All the ones that everyone had thrown out...We had to quickly build up another wall round us to protect us from all the beggars and lepers in Britain and America who came to see us. Our lives were getting insane! I tried when we were in Wigmore Street to see everyone like we said, everyone day in and day out, and there wasn't anyone who had anything to offer to society or me or anything. There was just, 'I want, I want, and why not?' and terrible scenes like that going on ...Even on the peace campaign we had a lot of that too. Once you open the door it's hard you know. (pages 41-42)
And in another interview:-
"I've always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean, it's just a basic working class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system. In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 and '66. And religion was directly the result of all that superstar XXXX- religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, 'Well, there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?...
Well, at that time [when the Beatles 'made it'] it was thought that the workers had broken through, but I realize in retrospect that it's the same phoney deal they gave to blacks, it was like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That's the choice they allow you- now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying in 'Working Class Hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have power, the class system didn't change one little bit. Of course there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same XXXXXXXX running everything." (pages 123-5)
LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and others had seized on to the market for entertainment from a newly prosperous teenage age-group that was being raised as a kind of validation of the struggles of the previous generations. And the historian Eric Hobsbawm, 28 years old at the end of the war, could look back in the 1990's at the new world that was being created after the war and see it as a "Golden Age". Because, though Arthur Miller drew back from 'nihilism', and John and Yoko gave the world "Imagine", daring people to think of removing the structures of received civilization to reveal a new reality of love, and sharing and peace, there were others who had found a talent for keeping up morale through 'light entertainment' during the war, as jokers and clowns of all ages have done. And radio, television, films and vaudeville had offered many the chance to "make it" using a talent for 'looking on the bright side of life'.
And, of course, there were reasons to be cheerful. The Cold War had entered a "peaceful co-existence" phase in the mid-Fifties in which both sides agreed to keep the contest between Capitalism and Communism focussed on the ability of the respective two systems to deliver what Bentham might call 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. So the teenage consumers of the Sixties in the West did not really have much of a "door" to kick down when new thrills and spills of 'sex, drugs and rock-and-roll' became part of the new consumerism that Communism could not match- and for many people the whole affair of the Sixties was in truth largely a fashion, fad and lifestyle "trip": a question of having a 'good time'.
And for those concerned with serious questions about this managed post-war world there were movements like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Civil Rights and Feminist movements. In fact Professor Beer was mistaken in believing that Britain in 196I had settled down to permanent one party Conservative rule. Harold Wilson seized upon the 'market' for dreams and presented the Party with a new improved Labour dream. The "White heat of technology" would produce a new prosperous Britain, where class did not matter. It was reasonable to suggest that the Attlee post-war experiment had been a mere Mark I 'New Britain' hampered by the 'make do and mend' conditions after the devastation of war, and that the times were now ready for a Mark 2. In an age when the Beatles were conquering the world in a new way it was possible for some 'angry young men' to believe "that the workers had broken through" and that a new industrial revolution might be planned and run by a New Deal kind of national scheme creating a new and comprehensive society that would finally heal the social cleavages that had come with industrialization.
In 1966 the New Spirit seemed to be validated when England won the Football World Cup. And the 'Children of the Ashes ' did provide vital support to those who were addressing real issues. Issues of war and peace, and the rights and burdens of ethnic minorities, teenagers and 'females' were taken up in "Western" countries, while people in "The Eastern Block" took up the question of the way that their lives were dominated by Moscow, and/or their local Communist Parties. Gaullist France, almost astride the East-West divide, put various strands together in "les evenements de Soixante Huite"- almost another French Revolution.
In fact the 'Human Rights' issue was one that could be used quite effectively in a kind of bidding war between various global "lifestyle" solutions on offer. The USSR could point to the greater gender equality and the greater efforts made to free women from their "biological burdens" to help them to have real careers. And the "summer kibbutz" experience that gave large numbers of western students (Scandinavians were most popular) the chance of a working holiday in the sun, and in a very different communal lifestyle that had always been associated with sexual freedom. So by the time of Woodstock "love and peace" also went along with a great many ideas about just how this era of post-war experimentation could be managed differently. But a scientific experiment presupposes the "all other things being equal" condition of total control.
In his concluding section Dr. Glover wrote that - "Thirty or forty years ago it was said.... that History was a science, better divorced from the literature and moral philosophy that had so long trailed about with her. The part played by men of mark ...in shaping the world's story, was, we were loudly told, exaggerated; movements were shaped by 'factors', and other abstract nouns." But, Glover went on, - "The course of the European war from 1914 to 1918 , and of the years of 'peace' since then, must have shown the least intelligent historian how much a man may count". (page 333)
Wartime and post-war analyis of the inter-war years, however, could show how various "factors" had shaped the events and had served to falsely elevate men of 'no mark'. It was chaos and revolutionary instability of various kinds that had made it possible for "little men" to seize on to and exploit great forces, which they were ultimately unable to master or control. Logic argued that the post-war world would need to manage political, econimic and social life much more carefully. So in 1941 in a piece entitled "Economic Man and Social Man" Dr. Huxley said:-
"All over the world, the old types of society and the old ways of life are disintegrating. There is a race in progress between disintegration and reintegration. If disintegration wins, the result will be chaos." Reintegration, he went on, could be achieved either by a "reactionary counter-revolution" achieved by an elite that would manage and control the social order, or by recreating a society that "will be much more of an organic whole, tied together mainly by the living relations of human beings and organized groups of human beings instead of mainly by the cold and impersonal forces of profit and economic competition." (page 16)"..society is not a mass of individuals. It consists of more or less sharply defined groups...Some groups are geographical..Others are functional..of two main kinds- those concerned with material ends and practical interests, like manufacture, or trade, or law, or medicine; and those concerned with ends in themselves, like sport or recreation, music or at, knowledge or worship...In an organised society, every individual and every group should have some claims upon society and some responsibilities toward it." (page 19)
But Dr. Huxley was too much a man of his age to truly believe in a Society in an equal partnership with the State. Confidence in the New Spirit of the Social model had failed once more as it did around 1870. So Huxley argued :- "In building our New Order, groups must be made to fit in to the social framework...Here much can be done by legislation".. But .."It may well be that, with the passage of time, group organizations, whether commercial firms or public bodies, will take over various responsibilities for housing, education, and leisure activities of their employees..and for the beautification of their neighbourhood...This humanizing and socializing of sectional groups is one way in which the new social order will differ from the old. Another, we can be pretty sure, is the insistence that will be laid on service to the community..[For] The urge to be useful is a normal part of the human make-up..However, there is no reason to suppose that peace-time national service cannot be organized in a way that is both satisfying and democratic..And there are plenty of other forms of service besides military service". (page 20-21)
"But service is only part of the story. Self-expression and self-development are as necessary and as desirable as self-sacrifice, and men and women have as much right to personal enjoyment and a full individual life as the community has to call upon their services..Perhaps the first thing to remember is that the vast majority of people to-day are simply unaware of the possibilities of fuller living which might be theirs. And this applies to service as much as to individual enjoyment. Before the war, most of us would have pooh-poohed the idea that we could enjoy hard and even dangerous work on behalf of others and the community at large. But, in spite of everything, there are to-day thousands who, though they may sometimes grumble, at heart have enjoyed fighting fires or acting as wardens or serving in canteens...To an equal extent, this unawareness is true of self-development and enjoyment. Most of us accept the world into which we are born. We may be acutely conscious that we would like a fuller life than we have got, but what we would like to fill it with consists in general merely of more of the enjoyments which our particular civilization already provides- more leisure to go to cinemas or football matches or dog-races, more opportunity to indulge little private hobbies, more money to cut more of a dash with, more opportunities of doing what the envied richer classes do with their wealth and leisure- smart display, travel cruises, expensive sport, dancing..A well-known sociologist once spoke of the "accursed wantlessness of the common people: most of us do not even know what we lack" (page 22)
But then that was surely a state of affairs that was encouraged by a situation in which- "One half of it [our society] does not know how the other half lives; except in times of war, there is little national feeling; and there is a sad absence of group awareness, group pride, or group expression in the cities and towns and rural districts of which the nation is made up".
As Professor Birnie had remarked in 1930 this was a general consequence of the history of industrialization. But the idea that people or groups could be "made to fit" into a New Order by legislation is a strange one to come from a believer in Darwinism and the inate capacity of living things to react to circumstance. For there is no comparability between human laws and 'laws of nature'. Nature shows no partiality or preference, or even fundamental purpose, and will not be swayed or deviated by protest or appeal. And English history is a long record of resistance by the common people to being 'put upon' according to the policies of central government that could be understood to be based upon frailties and failings that were only too human.
Perhaps Dr. Huxley may be excused for believing that the spirit of national unity and common purpose that he could see during "Finest Hours" represented an evolutionary change and permanent change, rather than a traditional English reaction to a "season" of war. He was after all a biologist and not an historian. For in fact the Disraelian dream of One Nation Toryism had shown once again just what the British people could achieve when they were united in a common cause.
As Dr. Huxley said: "It has been England's boast that since the Norman conquest she has evolved by creative compromise where other nations have been subject to violent revolutions." (page 27) And the result was that that 1066 was the last foreign conquest. But, as has been explained, the "creative compromise" in the national interest was often a conscious policy of toleration of difference and diversity, apart from those moments when it was necessary for 'all hands' to help to steer the 'ship of state' away from "the rocks".
LEAVE THEM LAUGHING WHEN YOU GO
But , since at least the start of the Age of Improvement, that course often been determined by the resultant force of the discourse of disaster and catastrophe that had moved politics away from the beliefs in "the common people" and the 'commonweal' that had underpinned English History. Rather it had set England clearly upon the route that would combine the strengths of the economic and political man, so much easier to handle "scientifically" in order to produce the power necessary to survive a turbulent age obsessed with power. And, as the product of his age and career in a great family tradition, Dr. Huxley could only see "perhaps the severest test in our history" as a "drastic transformation from the age of economic man to the age of social man, from individualist laissez-faire to a highly organized society". For the inter-war experience had suggested that any highly organized society would have to be based upon the State. The question was "..can we effect [the transformation] in such a way as not only to remain democratic but to raise democracy to new and heightened expression."
By the early Sixties a generation of British Students that had been at least educated and formed by the post-war New Order to enter the new improved establishment elite began to graduate and disperse into normal life, believing that it was possible that they were really going to help to really 'make a difference'.
Thus John Banham (born 1940) graduated in Natural Sciences from Cambridge in 1962 and spent some time in the Foreign Office and in industry before joining the management consultants McKinsey and Co in 1969. It was the basis for a career that would lead to his appointment as the first Controller of the Audit Commission and then Director General of the Confederation of British Industry. As such he was well-placed to see the problems of British industry during the Labour Mark 2 years, when the failure of the "In Place of Strife" initiative seemed to say it all. And, as he recounted in "The Anatomy of Change.Blueprint for a New Era" in 1995, he saw too the state of the UK as the repercussions of the new reality following the OPEC Oil Crisis of 1973 brought an end to the post-war period of heavily managed reality.
In his Preface he set the scene for his project:-
"The seeds for this book were sown twenty years ago when I was working in Washington DC, almost in the shadow of the White House..In the spring of 1975 it was time to return to London, to lead an assignment for the Central Policy Review Staff of the Cabinet Office on the future of the British car industry, which was then very much in doubt.
Although aware of the difficult times that had followed the first oil shock, I was not prepared for the talk on the BOAC flight about the possibility of a military coup; vigilantes were said to be drilling on the South Downs. When I arrived at McKinsey's London offices I found candles on the stairwells; this was in the aftermath of the three-day week when manufacturing output was virtually the same as in a supposedly 'normal' week. As I visited car assembly plants around the country I was regaled with continual stories of labour disputes...
After a few days back in Britain it was evident that I faced a choice: either to return to Washington and join the emigre community sitting it out in relative comfort; or stay and work towards a better future. I stayed and the situation worsened. Well before the winter of discontent- with cancer patients being denied treatment and stinking piles of refuse lying in the streets- the trade unions appeared to have undue and damaging influence over the national economic and political scene. The so-called 'social-contract' devised by Callaghan's Labour government turned out to be neither a contract enforceable at law nor socially responsible.
Ordinary people felt powerless to avert Britain's seemingly inexorable, if relative, economic decline and the deterioration in schools and hospitals. Managements offered a catalogue of complaints about the unions and government. Fear of the future seemed pervasive, economic failure almost to be expected. Success, like good service, came as a surprise. Very few people, other than those who had chosen their parents very carefully, enjoyed any measure of financial independence; taxes on personal incomes made it effectively impossible to build up any personal wealth except through speculation in housing. British society, and its politics, remained obsessed with class." (pages 1-2)
The "first oil shock" of 1973 had undermined the whole reality of cheap power on which both "Western" and "Eastern" blocks had come to depend. The post-war experiments had been based upon the fact that in 1945 the USA and the USSR were dominant 'superpowers' and their fortress-stances produced a kind of stability, under the threat of nuclear holocaust should either attempt to break the stalemate.
But a "Third World" had been developing, and the 'Achilles heel' of the industrial giants was that their industries, public infrastucture and the lifestyles of their people were based upon imported oil supplies. Their governments too because they reaped a greater revenue from taxes on oil than the producing countries got from selling the crude oil on which so many other industries depended. Perhaps equally important was the fact that as early as 1960 it was apparent that "A new economic, political and military force of colossal size is being created in the Far East with amazing and frightening rapidity." (Tibor Mende) Chinese Communism was different to Soviet Communism and offered its own way ahead in a world with many new variables. It all made prediction and forward planning of the kind introduced by Harold Wilson difficult if not impossible.
The answer had been to reconnect Britain with the successful tradition of English opportunism and liberty. Thus John Banham went on: "Such was the dire situation that Margaret Thatcher and the new Conservative government inherited in 1979.
To the evident surprise of most of the economic commentators and much informed opinion, by 1990 British business had been transformed by the combination of taming the trade unions, bringing public spending under control, opening up the economy to competition and giving managers both the chance to manage and the incentive to do so. A revolution had swept through Britain's boardrooms, factories, offices and high streets. Long-standing weaknesses in the economy were corrected : industrial relations imptroved out of all recognition; private investment in skills and innovation reached record levels, as did industrial productivity, manufactured exports and profits. Living standards had never been better for most families.
But in late 1990 it ended in tears. The principal architect of the Thatcher revolution was summarily removed from office. Sterling failed to maintain its position in the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System and had to be devalued amidst scenes all too reminiscent of the mid 1970's.Tens of thousands of people lost their life savings in businesses that could well have survived or prospered in Germany, France or even northern Italy; and more than a million home owners found they had mortgages for more than their properties were worth, even though home ownership had been encouraged as an investment certain to hold its value in an uncertain world.
By the end of 1993 Harold Wilson's reputation was enjoying a revival, as the resigned cynicism of the 1960's and 1970's took hold once again. Perhaps we are condemned to see our European neighbours improve their living standards faster, with our best days behind us. The improvements in most people's living standards during the 1980's might have been an illusion, purchased at the expense of investment in the future. Maybe we should expect our governments to be inept- moving from bungle to crisis, as one newspaper leader put it.
Small wonder that public confidence in those national institutions that the Thatcher revolution left largely untouched is so low, as people ask what went wrong . Parliament, the Civil Service, local government and the National Health Service are all on trial before the court of public opinion. The evidence for the prosecution is strong: a public sector borrowing requirement amounting to some £2,200 for the average household; a House of Commons that is divided over the nation's future in Europe; widespread concern about rising crime and a burgeoning underclass in many deprived inner city areas; an increase in the bureaucracy of the National Health Service, while waiting lists remain long and the latest reforms take their time to produce results." (pages- 2-3)
Naturally enough Mr Banham's response is shaped by his own education and expertise. His book is "an anatomy of change" and "a blueprint for a new era" based upon his specialist knowledge as a management consultant. But words like "symptom" and "anatomy" all point to the fact that this approach is based upon that scientific objectivity that means the kind of detachment in which the students in "The Anatomy Lesson" look on ,while a dead body is dissected so that they may achieve a post-mortem understanding of how that human body worked and then died.
On the basis of his 'post-mortem' analysis Mr Banham can conclude that "We are entering uncharted economic and political waters". But for someone dedicated to the idea of management, it was obvious that "..we must chart a new direction" even though there were no charts. In fact the secret of the success of the Thatcher Revolution was that it returned to the English traditions of lifting the cumbrous, if not dead, hand of the State, and releasing market forces and entrepreneurship once more. Once more the impulse driving the country forward could come from below, from people who wished to be more than just "the residual mass".
As Mr Banham desribes, there was a widespread feeling in the mid-Seventies in the United Kingdom that things had become unmanageable with "the nation apart" once more. Mr Heath had had even called a General Election on the issue of whether the Government or the Unions should run the country. It was tantamount to an admission of Tory failure, and the Lib-Lab pact was able to exploit it in order to return Mr Wilson to Downing Street. But it was a very weak coalition majority until Mr Wilson retired and handed over his "weak hand" to Mr Callaghan. By the 1979 General Election Margaret Thatcher was able to campaign in Churchillian style as was appropriate to "Darkest Hours", and became the first woman Prime Minister. Over the next ten years"Thatcherism" produced casualties, but, as Mr Banham outlined, it also restored much of Britain's fast diminishing capacity, only for the gains to be lost in the catastrophic collapse of 1990.
Given Mr. Banham's professional expertise and experience he could see this as a failure of the " national institutions that the Thatcher revolution left largely untouched. Parliament, the Civil Service, local government and the National Health Service". But, in fact, the malaise was a much deeper one. The lack of that strong impulse from below that had been so crucial throughout English history.
Matthew Arnold had dreamed of a flowering of a common national culture in 1869. So had Dr. Julian Huxley during the Second World War. So had Jackson and Marsden in the early Sixties. But Florence Nightingale was correct in her observation that by 1860 there was no common understanding among "the artisans" of Britain concerning the great and eternal dilemmas of human existence, the kind of consensus that seemed to underpin past and present Civilizations. And Lytton Strachey was very much in a traditional English mode in his treatment of Miss Nightingale's "three portly volumes" in which she tackled, he said, eternal differences "hitherto, curiously enough, unsolved..As one turns over these singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will kill Him with overwork" (page 166-167)
Perhaps earlier generations had applied that old English common sense maxim "if it ain't bust don't fix it": but, and this may be an intensely personal perspective, to a child born in 1944 with the world around being torn apart in a ring of violence "on which the Sun never set", with the loss of some 55 million souls to the hand of man, the world felt like it was pretty well 'busted up" and everything was 'to do'.
It felt like the Children of the Ashes were thrust into a situation summed up by the final phrase disclaimed by Sir Lawrence Olivier in Louis McNiece's late 'forties' radio play 'Christopher Columbus' - "Behold! I bring you a new world!" Earlier in the play Columbus urges his crew to observe the innocence of the natives kneeling before them and to take care not to bring the evils of the old world to this new world. But it is difficult to escape from the ghosts of the Past. By definition they have a capacity to haunt, and the only way to learn to deal with them is to understand their story, and learn lessons that may help to shape your own.
It was in this spirit that the present writer by the age of ten became convinced of the need to understand what Paramahansa Yogananda called the "negative karma" around the Earth and came to understand that the venerable old stone walls of his native Oxford housed a major aparatus created over preceding centuries for the study of Humanity and all its works. But, as Matthew Arnold realised too, and spelled out in the Scholar Gypsy, the equally venerable country environment around the "dreaming spires" also taught lessons of how Englishfolk had lived for centuries in a "green and pleasant land" in harmony with Nature, before the Age of Revolution had unleashed new and unsettling powers upon the world.
In a fragmented reality divided into 'hostile camps' the study of History offered an exploration of the common roots of an immediate world so that it might be possible to reconcile Oxford 'Town', Oxford 'Gown' and the village life, where Arnold detected the ghost of the Scholar Gypsy, into a coherent rootstock for a citizen of the Brave New World. But Oxford, as William Cobbett felt over a hundred years before, was too heavily weighted in the Past, personal and collective. Too many ghosts.
Bristol and Cardiff were cities forged largely by the nineteenth century industrial revolution: and hosted newer ghosts. And then the real challenge of the Future was still London's inner city, for such places still seemed to be the Crucible, the melting pot, which, like Lancashire in the early industrial revolution or the great melting pots of the Eastern USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, provided much of the unsettled and destabilising elements of the modern world. For the Lancashire of King Cotton had done much to sponsor and create revolutionary Socialism and Communism, and urban slums had provided fertile ground for such ideas to be nursed and nurtured.
In fact having headed for the "deprived inner city" the writer ended up working near "the front line", where many of the pupils in a 37 year teaching career were contemporary "Children of the Ashes". Not just the least favoured and most unfortunate of Huxley's British"residual mass", but 'flotsam and jetsom' from misfortune all around the globe. Some were crushed and defeated, and instinctively programmed to fight back. But very few. And it was a great blessing for someone wishing to understand the world that during that long teaching career exploring history in the inner city, it seemed that representatives from almost all over the world came to live and build their futures in South London as English men and women.
Some, like that baby-boom generation, felt the burden of living up to their parents need to believe that their sacrifices would in fact produce a better future for the next generation And some rose magnificently to the challenge. This was perhaps felt most of all by the young girl who arrived as the only member of her family to survive from the small boat on which they had cast off from Cambodia. No-one in 37 years better exemplified the power of a belief that the only way to build a better future was to live with hope and determination to make use of England as a land of opportunity where, with encouragement and empowerment, it might be possible to grow up with the ability to help to build a better Britain, as a New Model for a better world.
In 2010 that is still very much work in progress: as is my ongoing exploration of History. But the recent death of Norman Wisdom is a reminder of how this 'little man' overcame personal tragedy to cast a professional ray of sunshine over the world of the early Fifties: and how the present writer won a talent competition at Christmas 1954 singing his hit song "Don't Laugh at Me, Cause I'm a Fool."
"Some day may be, my star will shine on me.
Don't laugh at me, cause I'm a fool."
BUILDING A NEW WORLD ORDER
By 1944, as people around the world hoped to see the 'beginning of the end', and then in 1945 could see that the "Anglo-Saxon model" had once again found a way to come out on top, it was also the case that both Britain and the USA were committed to positions and courses that involved the abandonment of much of that freedom of manoeuvre and geographical advantage that had brought them success thus far.
Britain abandonned the English tradition of keeping the weight and power of the State to an irreduceable minimum, leaving the people with the maximum amount of freedom to exploit their traditional strengths, wisdoms and customs in order to 'make the best' of their lives. The state and not the people now became the key to the future in a still potentially catastrophic reality; catastrophic not least because the modern state, in addition to the proven capacity to launch devastating conventional world war, had now added the ultimate capacity to launch a nuclear holocaust. Moreover, the pressures that had been building up for the break up of the British Empire into new and independent states were accommodated by a withdrawal from a global Britishness to a much more insular one- much more manageable for an over-burdened and cumbrous state.
But the important global role of Great Britain in the Victorian and Edwardian eras was now better understood: and the USA could only hope to continue to thrive as the "workshop of the world" if it now took up that burden. John Maynard Keynes had been furious in the Versailles negotiations when he found that the US banks had no intention of accepting the responsibilities that went along with the Gold Reserves of the Bank of England. But Keynesian economics had been fundamental to the New Deal, and to the talks at Bretton Woods, at which the USA undertook obligations to underwrite, support and maintain the new and improved world order through the IMF and World Bank. As the acknowledged leader of the global alliance against the Axis Powers the USA also undertook the role of host and major funder of a new United Nations organisation. Once the war was over- though not yet for the USSR- the implications of these obligations for the American people were spelled out in the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, and underlined by the Berlin Air-lift of 1947-8. If not through these, then through the leading role of the USA in the United Nations 'military action' in Korea, the American public came to understand the weight of the new responsibilities they had taken on.
In 1944 some of those thinking of forging a better world might have read the new Penguin edition of Dr. Glover's 'Ancient World' and took encouragement from his section on 'the Peace of Augustus':-
"Old tradition requires that the historian shall chronicle wars and battles, and it has been faithfully done by Roman historians. Less attention had been given to what Rome replaced to the wars, battles, seditions, and revolutions, to which her rule put an end. We have to think of what happened in the streets of Greek cities...,of the bloodthirsty wars between Greek cities, of the ambitious wars of kings who followed Alexander.., while we may be sure that there were endless horrors and disorders of the same kind that went unrecorded...how much there was of brigandage, piracy and slave-raiding; to think of the habit of war, the'war-madness' of the tribes of Gaul; and then to reflect that, broadly speaking, all this ceased and peace rules, healing the wounds of centuries, restoring spirit and giving new hope to mankind...In the year 27 B.C Augustus 'restored the Republic'. Later generations are unable to see that this made any real difference in the government of the world..[But] The world accepted the Imperial system; it had indeed no choice; but, outside Rome, or certain groups in Rome, there was no wish for anything else; here was peace, and with it justice, order and hope of recovery. Among the old noble families the change was not welcome; they recalled a past of privilege, of which they were dispossessed..But once we are clear of the clubs and circles of Rome...we find acceptance of the new order almost universal." (page 296-9)
It was this Pax Romanum that had inspired Cecil Rhodes, who had a vision of the combined might of Great Britain and its Empire, the USA and Germany all wedded to industrialism, progress and democracy establishing such an autonomy that would put humankind on a path to ending "the horrors and disorders" of war and conflict. But, as usually happened with civilizations, order could only be established and maintained through the exertion of massive power within and without. And the victory of "Christian Civilization" in 1945 was not yet secure for it faced both external threat and internal subversion.
In Britain the state-management adopted in time the war, and now extended into the peace, could be presented in evolutionary terms as the logical outcome the Age of Improvement. But Macarthyism in the USA could be presented by Arthur Miller as another episode of hysterically witch-hunting. Whatever way the changes were portrayed, they were real enough: and, if previous English and American popular struggles had been against various tyrannies, these two peoples with strong traditions of the liberty of the individual now found themselves living in much more State managed and dominated realities.
Significantly, when that slim volume of pieces by Dr Huxley, a popular figure on the BBC Brain's Trust, was published in 1944, an article written in 1941 entitled "Education as a Social Function" was placed last - leaving a lasting impression of the vital role of education in the shaping of the future:- "....education is the function by virtue of which the social tradition, both in its general and in its specialized aspects, is reproduced and enabled to evolve. In includes the transmission of a common language, of a common minimum basis of knowledge and skills; of the common traditions and ideals of society, and of certain norms of behaviour. It further includes the transmission, via limited minorities, of specialized skills and techniques, craft and professional, and of certain general aspects of tradition via special elites. So from another angle education may be said to concern itself with the training of three sections within society- the elites, the specialists, and the residual mass." (page 181)
He went on to sum up "the chief changes in educational theory which have emerged in the last half-century". (a) more emphasis on its change-facilitating function as against its change-resisting function; (b) concern with the future and approximation to ideal but scientific standards rather than the past and old non-scientific ideals like those of religion and philosophy; (c) less stress on normative education imposing orthodoxy, but more stress on the scientific spirit, individual thought and development; (d) recognising the need to provide a high degree of social stimulation and social-self-consciousness, and (e) "recognition of sane relativity as against a sham universality, of the fact that education is not only inevitably conditioned by the limitations of time and place but should be consciously related to the needs of the particular society of which it is a function". (page 181-2)
The "sane relativity" that Dr. Huxley probably had in mind was the need to cope with "Living in a Revolution"; for it is very easy now to underestimate that sense of being in a titanic struggle against the scientific and technological might of Nazi Germany. 1944 that year of the start of the 'Vengeance Weapons' also saw Sir Noel Curtis Bennett publish a book sub-titled 'The History of Industrial Feeding'. That seems fairly inocuous, but ends in a blaze of hyperbole:-
"Not only has the science of nutrition made enormous strides so that we can now measure accurately what foods are necessary to keep every man and woman as fit as possible for their job, but we can go further and learn much about the effect of environment on the individual both physically and psychologically...To-day the only weapon we have against the use of science by madmen for destructive purposes is its use by sane constructive scientists for enriching and widening the life of the individual and eliminating physical and mental disorders and destructive forces. To-day we live inevitably in an industrial civilization - a civilization made possible by the enormous advances of physical science over the last two centuries. The future of civilization depends on how we make use of this vast pool of knowledge the scientists have bequeathed to us, and also of the tremendous efficiency of new techniques of investigation... To-day with the great resources of science at our disposal we still find millions starving and destroying themselves in a world capable of producing more than enough for everybody. In peacetime we have slumps and over-production producing anxiety and widespread misery which inevitably pave the way to war. The majority of people in this world are not merely undernourished physically, they are even more undernourished mentally...Education should go side by side with nourishment and nourishment should go side by side with work. To-day is the great opportunity to free humanity from bondage and increase its powers of life- individual life and life in the family and society. The industrial canteed has its part to play as a nucleus of a wider life for everybody." (page 301-303)
This idea of the social engineering and other benefits of communal feeding go back aat least to the Rule of St. Benedict, or more recently to Robert Owen's 'New Lanark Mills' experiment: and in his 1969 study of "The Children of the Dream" Bruno Bettelheim explains that the communal dining hall was regarded as the heart of the kibbutz collectives that were set up in the inter-war period.
The 'kibbutzim' were trying to build a new world, and part of the newness was the rejection of the old rigidies of the 'ghetto', which placed a rigid template of family life and gender roles. Kibbutz living was to be more natural with women treated in a much more egalitarian fashion, and hence entitled to a social and sex life. The pioneers had worked hard, played hard, and fought hard against Arab attacks. But this left very little time for parenting so, as in a number of experiments of the period, they had adopted the process of bringing up the children as collective groups- the next generation would have a sense of peer cohesion that tended to outweigh, or at least counter-weigh, the traditional impact of the Jewish extended family. And when Bettelheim had the chance to stay in and study a kibbutz in 1964 the resulting sense of generational gap was very palpable.
The 'Children of the Dream', he found, were very aware of the 'great adventure' that their parents had lived. How they had broken away from their roots, come as pioneers, and had built their community out of nothing. They were great and admirable, and all that was left to the new generation was to settle down into a new conformity and reap the harvest in the same kind of monotonous and hard-working life that their parents had fled from. For the founders, sprung from generations of 'ghetto' dwellers in Central Europe, even if some had spent some time in the New York 'ghetto', living off the land was part of the collective dream of the age. For the next generation it was all that they had known. But to some extent this was the common experience of those who grew up in the aftermath of the "Finest Hours" of their parent's and grandparent's generations.
Bettelheim quoted David Rapaport who said- "The upbringing of children in the agricultural collectives in Israel is for the social scientist what an 'experiment in nature' is for the natural scientist." And to some extent much the same could be said for the upbringing of children in the post-war world, for they were at the very heart of a collective desire to build what Eric Hobsbawm called "The Golden Age".
THE CHILDREN OF THE ASHES
Parents did their bit, as in the "battles for births" in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Whatever the precise connection in biology between fighting and procreation, the post-war baby-boom showed that it was real enough; and for grand-parents and parents whose lives had been blighted by the horrors of two world wars, and various catastrophes in-between, the new life brought its eternal promise. "Lord now lettest though thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation" said an old man when he saw the boy Jesus on his first visit to the Temple at Jerusalem: and the writer's mother would often recall how total strangers would stop her out shopping and admire her beautiful baby (born 1944) or how he entertained everyone on the country bus as a toddler singing endlessly "Bears eat oats and does eat oats But little lambs eat ivy. A kid'l eat ivy too. Wouldn't you."
During "Darkest Hours" people had made a point of looking for "the silver lining", and now there was a real, palpable and lively future potential, which was grasped and nurtured by the collective that undertook to care for this new generation "From the cradle to the grave". In the USA of the Sixties Bruno Bettelheim juxtaposed the kibbutz solution with the American problem of the slum child. "Can such children, if they continue to live in the slums, still learn to become citizens who will for ever do away with the very conditions that bred them? Or does a better life for them depend upon their removal from the slums in their formative years?" (page 15)
Slum clearance and rehousing policies had been part of British politics since the 1860's: but the Thirties had seen a great increase in slum clearance and this went on apace after 1945. Council estates were equipped with the all important communal halls, where occasional special meals could be housed and which could serve as the heart of new would-be communities. But the real heart of the community was its school, and it was through the school that people, who had nothing to do with the family, made sure that children were well fed- especially those entitled to free meals, that they were properly and decently clothed, clean and presentable, and had regular medical checks to make sure that they were developing healthily. It had become axiomatic that "our children are our future".
But, though less dramatically than "The Children of the Ashes" of Hiroshima, studied in a book of that title, all of the global post-war baby boom confronted to some degree that same dichotomy between the almost desperate hope for a future of love and happiness that surrounded them and the catastrophic legacy of the period from 1914 to 1945. They were projected towards a better future, if the world got that far, for they could sense -even if only subconsciously- that outside of the "Happy Days"/ Walt Disney kind of world that they were supposed to be living in, daily reality both at home, nationally and internationally was often very different.
For a start the strains on family life that had been such a feature of the industrial revolution of the steam and factory age had continued; and in many ways had got worse through the strain placed by both war and peace. Back in the early 1920's Millicent Garrett Fawcett gave up the leadership of the Women's Movement after many decades over the proposal to support Family Allowances being paid directly to mothers, cutting out their fathers. This would, she argued, weaken the all- important partnership between the parents. The first Labour Government introduced the measure in 1924, and after 1945 with the creation of the Welfare State the success of the partnership of husband and wife became even less crucial. The state would provide for mothers and children. Perhaps it was just as well; because many marriages and relationships broke down from the impact of the war and its aftermath: and many children were not even the result on any kind of settled relationship. Nevertheless , given the state of divorce law, many children were brought up in loveless homes and worse.
Historically, however, these were days of "You've never had it so good": and it was possible for Professor Beer of Harvard University to postulate in 1961 that Britain was now such an effectively managed enterprise that two party democracy was effectively dead. As he explained, the work of the Attlee Government achieved all of the programme and goals set out by the Labour Party in the election of 1918 within the space of a few years. A crisis came in April 1951 when Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson split the Party on the issues of funding the British participation in the Korean War and introducing prescription charges into the National Health. Professor Beer saw this in a positive light, since it had brought the Conservative Party back in to power; and statistically this seemed to be the "natural party" of government in the twentieth century. In future government would be a question of managing single issues, he thought.
But management on this scale was very much new territory and there had been no "long pilgrimage", merely the exceptional war time expedients during two World Wars, when the deficiencies and inefficiencies were covered over not least by a "paying whatever it costs" approach. For some in "the establishment", of course, there had been that huge experiment in government that had been the British Raj; and some had maintained for a long time that the Indians lacked the genius for being ruled possessed by the English. Now the value of the "Raj" methods would be proven in the UK.
In fact Fifties Britain became associated with wild-cat strikes be-deviling British industry, 'closed shops', sending to Coventry, and a wider culture of angry young men and rebellious teenagers.
It might have been interesting had Jackson and Marsden had looked at the attitudes to school and establishment culture of those who were generally described as having "failed the eleven plus". Perhaps working class culture thought that taking young people out of the Labour market, as well as many of the women, was worth it if it meant full employment. Perhaps the same could be said of the two years compulsory military service that offered young men the chance to measure themselves against the standards of Britain's military tradition. Because all this time there was the shadow of minor wars and conflicts, UN peace-keeping missions and the threat of escalation into nuclear holocaust.
But the post-war generation were still teenagers on that crisis day during the Cuba Missile Crisis when the "masters of war" might have pushed the button and made it the last day for life of Earth. And soon enough the American branch of that generation was confronted with the long agony of the war in Vietnam.
So, in many ways, it was potentially at least another "Lost Generation". But they found each other and that changed everything. The post-war politics of expanding leisure, consumerism, and education throughout the recovering 'developed world' provided young people around the world with similar new opportunities to come together and to discover common ground as never before. In the face of all the mass of science and technology young people rediscovered the charm of folk cultures and almost simultaneously the way that various folk influences had blended in the American melting pot to produce new "pop" music for the times. Wherever two or three were gathered together, the act of gathering in itself created a dynamic, a learning experience and a collective self-belief. Many of the Sixties Generation embraced the spirit of open-minded enquiry in the pathless land promoted by many thinkers and writers during the inter-war period. It was a great age of students as many countries had set out to produce larger university and college educated elites. And not all students were within formal education.
Having been brought up in a carefully managed reality, many from all branches of the 'student body' were not prepared to stay within the 'tramlines' laid down by "the establishment". Already the inter-war period and the Second World War had made globalisation a reality and input was increasingly welcomed from cultures around the world. In 1946 Paramahansa Yogananda published his "Autobiography of a Yogi in which he wrote:-
"The great masters of India who have shown keen interest in the West have well understood modern conditions. They know that, until there is better assimilation in all nations of the distinctive Eastern and Western virtues, world affairs cannot improve. Each hemisphere needs the best offerings of the other.
In the course of world travel I have sadly observed much suffering: in the Orient, suffering chiefly on the material plane; in the Occident, misery chiefly on the mental or spiritual plane. All nations feel the painful effects of unbalanced civilizations. India and many other Eastern lands can greatly benefit from emulation of the practical grasp of affairs and material efficiency, of Western nations like America. The Occidental peoples, on the other hand, require a deeper understanding of the spiritual basis of life, and particularly of scientific techniques that India recently developed for man's conscious communication with God.
The ideal of a well-rounded civilization is not a chimerical one. For millenniums India was a land of both spiritual light and widespread material prosperity. The poverty of the last 200 years is, in India's long history, only a passing karmic phase. A byword in the world century after century, was "the riches of the Indies".." (page 557-8)
It was Yogadanda's book that inspired George Harrison's interest in Indian culture, and through him the Beatles , and many others . But the Sixties generation also looked back to writers, thinkers and artists from the inter-war period whose work reflected that post-deluge conviction that much in the existing dominant civilization needed to be challenged, or at least looked at in a different light. Bob Dylan went back to the style of the American singer who charted the Depression Years, Woodie Guthrie, and wrote songs for the new age when answers were 'Blowin in the Wind'. He spoke for many when he sang 'The times they are a'changin .. your old road is rapidly fadin, get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand."
Among many songs that went right to the heart of the dynamics of that time one might pick out Graham Nash's "Teach Your Children Well" (1970)
"You who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by.
And so become yourself
Because the past
Is just a goodbye.
Teach your children well
Their father's hell
Will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks
The one you'll know by.
And you of tender years
Can't know the fears
That your elders grew by
And please help them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die.
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you you will cry
So just look at then and sigh
And know they love you."
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
It was a generation that could not accept that:- "The only weapon we have against the use of science by madmen for destructive purposes is its use by sane constructive scientists for enriching and widening the life of the individual and eliminating physical and mental disorders and destructive forces". Nor that the future was in the hands of a small international confederacy that made up an intellectual elite. Nor that a merely national culture as envisaged by Matthew Arnold, and reprised by Jackson and Marsden, would suffice in this global age. For art and creativity showed a power to cross boundaries as a form of human expression that was much more universally empowering than verbal of numerical language. The power to touch and to be touched was palpable , and perhaps the essence of the mood of the times was best summed up in the sub-title of Dr.E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Really Mattered." [1973]
There had to be more to life than this discourse of catastrophe and disaster, and there had been those like Arthur Miller and Albert Camus, who had been trying to feed Greek Hellenism back into the world, while teachers had thrown out the challenge to many of trying to aim for those classic values of Renaissance Humanism and "The Universal Genius" like Leonardo da Vinci, who could master both art and science. The modern popular art of the cinema highlighted the struggle between man and machine in a great deal of science fiction, while Charlton Heston's portrayal of Michelangelo in "The Agony and the Ecstacy" reminded everyone of what heroic individualism could achieve.
Amidst a great enthusiasm for "mental nourishment" "Tarka: The Otter" was reprinted in 1965 and again in 1969. But this was a new age and time for a new story. In the mid-Sixties Richard Adams set off with his family on a long drive to Stratford Upon Avon. On the way 'Father Adams' told a rabbit story to help his children to pass the time. Subsequently he wrote it into a novel, and "Watership Down" was published in 1972. It is the story of the odyssey undertaken by a group of rabbits, who flee from the heartless destructivity of modern development blighting the land. Passing through various adventures, including one when they are invited to stay in a seemingly very secure and well-managed warren, they end up living the good and simple life in an English peace on a hilltop at a safe distance from the world of catastrophe and disaster. Here firm friends of one heart could prosper and at the end could look back at what they had done and what they would leave behind, and see that it was good.
"Watership Down", like "Tarka" more than forty years before , caught the tide of the public imagination as the Sixties generation lit up the modern world with hope and expectation that it would still be possible to build a world in which people mattered. The reality of Living in a Revolution was vividly portrayed in the film version of Doctor Zhivago: and in a key moment in the story Omar Sherif and Julie Christie are almost like the Adam and Eve of a new world living isolated in a winter wilderness, with Julie Christie reminding the world of the strength, resourcefulness and courage of womanhood. But a more important inspiration was the great 1963 March on Washington and Dr Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech.
Any event in the major capitals of the world was likely to have to meet the criteria of those who 'managed' affairs: and the Washington March, and the great meeting at its end, were organised in close cooperation with John and Robert Kennedy. They wished to show the strength of support for their civil rights initiatives. But there was last minute controversy over the text of the speech submitted by John Lewis, the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Condemning the Kennedy civil rights bill as "too little, and too late", he went on " We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation...Which side is the federal government on?..The revolution is at hand..If any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about...We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way that Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground- nonviolently. We shall crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy." (pages 281-2)
In the end Lewis agreed to a different text; and delivered his speech with two Kernnedy aides ready to 'pull the plug'.
Dr King, however, did not meet with that fate, when he deviated from his prepared speech. As David Garrow put it: "The massive rally was a powerful and joyous scene, with both speeches and musical presentations evoking fervent emotional response. The program was well along before King's turn came to speak, and he moved forward carrying his prepared text. "I started out reading the speech,"he recalled in a private interview three months later, and then, "just all of a sudden- the audience response was wonderful that day - and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used- I'd used it many times before, that thing about 'I have a dream'- and I just felt that I wanted to use it here. I don't know why, I hadn't thought about it before the speech.' So he dispensed with the prepared text and went on extemporaneously. He had used the same peroration previously..but on this warm August afternoon, standing before tens of thousands of people, the words carried an inspirational power greater than many of those present had ever heard before." (page 283)
Here on the steps of the Washington Monument eighteen years after the end of the Second World War someone was able to become the mouthpiece for the values towards which the post-war baby-boomers had been struggling out of darkness and towards light:- "When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children- black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestant and Catholics- will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the olf Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last: thank God Almighty, we are free at last." (page 284)
But such raised voices could only confirm that the road to the Promised Land must lead away from a global inheritance that left too much of its mark on those who had lived too long in unsure times. In his autobiography "Timebends" Athur Miller describes how in a time of uncertainty he was probing for his own way forward as a writer:-
"Another of these unfinished probes of 1950 was the story of a group of research physicians employed by a wealthy pharmaceuticals maker who inspires them to important discoveries while suborning them to his business interests, subtly taking over their very wills as he strokes their ambitions. Aternately mocking his crude commercialism, and sucking up to him, they typify what I then saw as the captive artist-creator.
Into their midst comes the mistress of Dr. Tibbets, Lorraine, a character modeled rather distantly on Marilyn, whom I still barely knew. With her open sexuality, childlike and sublimely free of ties and expectations in a life she half senses is doomed, she moves instinctively to break the hold of respectability on the men until each in his different way meets the tragedy in which she unwittingly entangled him- one retreats to loveless and destructive marriage in fear of losing social standing; another abandons his family for her, only to be abandoned in turn when her interests change. Like a blind, godlike force, with all its creative cruelty, her sexuality comes to seem the only truthful connection with some ultimate nature, everything that is life-giving and authentic. She flashes a ghastly illumination upon the social routinization to which they are all tied and whicch is killing their souls- but she has no security of her own and no faith, and her liberating promise is finally illusory.
Behind the whole story stands an idealistic image of the humane role they had originally believed their science to play, a redemptive power they no longer have the strength and faith to grasp. They have matured into the ego-time when there is no ideal that cannot be seen through, no belief that can fill its adherents with creative hope in a culture that has prized man's sexuality from his social ideals and made one the contradiction of the other.
The play remained unfinished because I could not accept the nihilistic spiritual catastrophe it persisted in foretelling. That is, I believed it as a writer but could not confess to it as a man. I could not know, of course, that in coming years I would live out much of its prophecy myself." (page 326)
When Miller got to know Marilyn much better, he discovered in her a rare talent for instantly identifying within a crowd anyone else who had shared her experience of an abandonned and loveless childhood. But Miller and Monroe, the couple, were both "captive artist-creators" trying to make their way in an industry that was powered by "crude commercialism" and "sucking up". And yet, as Miller recounts, the press could turn on Marilyn viciously as they did one day when she was coming home 'out of character'. They hunted her down and the next day the front pages exposed "the most beautiful woman in the world?" looking plain, desperate and bedraggled amidst a pile of dustbins. And the UnAmerican Activities Committee turned on Miller.
Miller describes how Marilyn "had come to give moral support during the last days of the hearing ..It had never been easy for me to share trouble- weakness- with a woman, just as my father had always kept bad news to himself. and..this stoicism had seemed like strength. Something like fear was filling her up at my closing myself off. I was protecting a wound, defensively turning inward, but she glimpsed herself an unwanted wife...Like a child, like me, she wanted to dissolve the boundaries of her mind and body in another person, in the world, and I had seemed to throw her back on herself"(page 412)
As an old friend, who had studied psychology pointed out to Arthur Miller, what Miller and Monroe had in common was their conscience- a sense of guilt and inadequacy that left them unable to accept a state of perfection, or believe that they deserved it. As in the title of one of Marilyn's last pictures they were "Misfits".
Before the Committee procedings had started, Miller's mother and Marilyn had come to see him off:- " My mother actually succeeded in pretending nothing ominous was happening and talked about Marilyn's clothes, which I thought made her seem insensitive in Marilyn's eyes. She had a complicated and fluctuating relation with older women, veering from sentimental idealization to black suspicions that they disapproved of her. She had been sentimentalizing my mother, but now there was a suggestion of an undertow in her feeling, a dark negative pull. Still, when I turned on the platform stairway and waved a final goodbye, they were arm in arm and seemed a pair." (page 405-6)
But if Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe somehow came to exemplify the aspects of the Fifties, John Lennon and Yoko Ono exemplified aspects of the Sixties. In this instance Lennon was the great media idol, who had become commodified and had, in that phrase of Winston Churchill, the press either at his throat or at his feet. In fact by his own testimony John Lennon had really 'lost it' for some years before he met Yoko Ono.
The Beatles had just got together in their teens writing "Northern Songs" and thinking that earning a living making music in a growing entertainment industry would be better than most other futures open to them. The best times were when they got the chance to play for hours and 'work an audience',as they did in Hamburg. But like Miller's pharmaceutical chemists they needed capital and management in order to really develop the full potential of the particular kind of music that they were developing. So they had to become a brand, a commodity that could be mass-produced and rolled out over the world. Nevertheless, it took everyone by surprise just how much a global audience responded to the Beatles. As John Lennon recalled, they had started out wanting to be Goffin and King, then Eddie Cochran- "and finally we arrived a wanting to be bigger than the biggest- and that was Elvis." (page 22)
They achieved this when they went and 'conquered' the USA. But Elvis had been groomed in the same glamour tradition as Marilyn Monroe. And just as the Beatles knew all about the way that Hollywood Sex Goddesses had come along to turn on everyone- including the pubescent boys they all had been- the Beatles found that their mass audience was heavily weighted towards pubescent girls, who filled the massive stadium concerts with a deafening wall of sound in their hysteria and idolatory. The sound systems of the period could not drown out the crowd noise, so the Beatles lost even any awareness of their own performance, or, perhaps more significantly, the kind of audience response that had so moved Martin Luther King.
A new generation was growing up since the years of catastrophe and austerity- an age of affluence or the dream of it. Later on, when the Beatles were aware that they had more material wealth than they could ever need, and yet, because of that, knew that materialism was not enough for humankind, John Lennon could look back on their Apple experiment after the death of 'the fifth Beatle' Brian Epstein- their manager/Svengali.
"Apple was a manifestation of Beatle naivety, collective naivity. We said,' We're going to do this and help everybody'...and we got conned on the subtlest and bluntest level. We really didn't get approached by the best artists, we got all the XXXX from everywhere else. All the ones that everyone had thrown out...We had to quickly build up another wall round us to protect us from all the beggars and lepers in Britain and America who came to see us. Our lives were getting insane! I tried when we were in Wigmore Street to see everyone like we said, everyone day in and day out, and there wasn't anyone who had anything to offer to society or me or anything. There was just, 'I want, I want, and why not?' and terrible scenes like that going on ...Even on the peace campaign we had a lot of that too. Once you open the door it's hard you know. (pages 41-42)
And in another interview:-
"I've always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean, it's just a basic working class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system. In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 and '66. And religion was directly the result of all that superstar XXXX- religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, 'Well, there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?...
Well, at that time [when the Beatles 'made it'] it was thought that the workers had broken through, but I realize in retrospect that it's the same phoney deal they gave to blacks, it was like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That's the choice they allow you- now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying in 'Working Class Hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have power, the class system didn't change one little bit. Of course there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same XXXXXXXX running everything." (pages 123-5)
LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and others had seized on to the market for entertainment from a newly prosperous teenage age-group that was being raised as a kind of validation of the struggles of the previous generations. And the historian Eric Hobsbawm, 28 years old at the end of the war, could look back in the 1990's at the new world that was being created after the war and see it as a "Golden Age". Because, though Arthur Miller drew back from 'nihilism', and John and Yoko gave the world "Imagine", daring people to think of removing the structures of received civilization to reveal a new reality of love, and sharing and peace, there were others who had found a talent for keeping up morale through 'light entertainment' during the war, as jokers and clowns of all ages have done. And radio, television, films and vaudeville had offered many the chance to "make it" using a talent for 'looking on the bright side of life'.
And, of course, there were reasons to be cheerful. The Cold War had entered a "peaceful co-existence" phase in the mid-Fifties in which both sides agreed to keep the contest between Capitalism and Communism focussed on the ability of the respective two systems to deliver what Bentham might call 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. So the teenage consumers of the Sixties in the West did not really have much of a "door" to kick down when new thrills and spills of 'sex, drugs and rock-and-roll' became part of the new consumerism that Communism could not match- and for many people the whole affair of the Sixties was in truth largely a fashion, fad and lifestyle "trip": a question of having a 'good time'.
And for those concerned with serious questions about this managed post-war world there were movements like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Civil Rights and Feminist movements. In fact Professor Beer was mistaken in believing that Britain in 196I had settled down to permanent one party Conservative rule. Harold Wilson seized upon the 'market' for dreams and presented the Party with a new improved Labour dream. The "White heat of technology" would produce a new prosperous Britain, where class did not matter. It was reasonable to suggest that the Attlee post-war experiment had been a mere Mark I 'New Britain' hampered by the 'make do and mend' conditions after the devastation of war, and that the times were now ready for a Mark 2. In an age when the Beatles were conquering the world in a new way it was possible for some 'angry young men' to believe "that the workers had broken through" and that a new industrial revolution might be planned and run by a New Deal kind of national scheme creating a new and comprehensive society that would finally heal the social cleavages that had come with industrialization.
In 1966 the New Spirit seemed to be validated when England won the Football World Cup. And the 'Children of the Ashes ' did provide vital support to those who were addressing real issues. Issues of war and peace, and the rights and burdens of ethnic minorities, teenagers and 'females' were taken up in "Western" countries, while people in "The Eastern Block" took up the question of the way that their lives were dominated by Moscow, and/or their local Communist Parties. Gaullist France, almost astride the East-West divide, put various strands together in "les evenements de Soixante Huite"- almost another French Revolution.
In fact the 'Human Rights' issue was one that could be used quite effectively in a kind of bidding war between various global "lifestyle" solutions on offer. The USSR could point to the greater gender equality and the greater efforts made to free women from their "biological burdens" to help them to have real careers. And the "summer kibbutz" experience that gave large numbers of western students (Scandinavians were most popular) the chance of a working holiday in the sun, and in a very different communal lifestyle that had always been associated with sexual freedom. So by the time of Woodstock "love and peace" also went along with a great many ideas about just how this era of post-war experimentation could be managed differently. But a scientific experiment presupposes the "all other things being equal" condition of total control.
In his concluding section Dr. Glover wrote that - "Thirty or forty years ago it was said.... that History was a science, better divorced from the literature and moral philosophy that had so long trailed about with her. The part played by men of mark ...in shaping the world's story, was, we were loudly told, exaggerated; movements were shaped by 'factors', and other abstract nouns." But, Glover went on, - "The course of the European war from 1914 to 1918 , and of the years of 'peace' since then, must have shown the least intelligent historian how much a man may count". (page 333)
Wartime and post-war analyis of the inter-war years, however, could show how various "factors" had shaped the events and had served to falsely elevate men of 'no mark'. It was chaos and revolutionary instability of various kinds that had made it possible for "little men" to seize on to and exploit great forces, which they were ultimately unable to master or control. Logic argued that the post-war world would need to manage political, econimic and social life much more carefully. So in 1941 in a piece entitled "Economic Man and Social Man" Dr. Huxley said:-
"All over the world, the old types of society and the old ways of life are disintegrating. There is a race in progress between disintegration and reintegration. If disintegration wins, the result will be chaos." Reintegration, he went on, could be achieved either by a "reactionary counter-revolution" achieved by an elite that would manage and control the social order, or by recreating a society that "will be much more of an organic whole, tied together mainly by the living relations of human beings and organized groups of human beings instead of mainly by the cold and impersonal forces of profit and economic competition." (page 16)"..society is not a mass of individuals. It consists of more or less sharply defined groups...Some groups are geographical..Others are functional..of two main kinds- those concerned with material ends and practical interests, like manufacture, or trade, or law, or medicine; and those concerned with ends in themselves, like sport or recreation, music or at, knowledge or worship...In an organised society, every individual and every group should have some claims upon society and some responsibilities toward it." (page 19)
But Dr. Huxley was too much a man of his age to truly believe in a Society in an equal partnership with the State. Confidence in the New Spirit of the Social model had failed once more as it did around 1870. So Huxley argued :- "In building our New Order, groups must be made to fit in to the social framework...Here much can be done by legislation".. But .."It may well be that, with the passage of time, group organizations, whether commercial firms or public bodies, will take over various responsibilities for housing, education, and leisure activities of their employees..and for the beautification of their neighbourhood...This humanizing and socializing of sectional groups is one way in which the new social order will differ from the old. Another, we can be pretty sure, is the insistence that will be laid on service to the community..[For] The urge to be useful is a normal part of the human make-up..However, there is no reason to suppose that peace-time national service cannot be organized in a way that is both satisfying and democratic..And there are plenty of other forms of service besides military service". (page 20-21)
"But service is only part of the story. Self-expression and self-development are as necessary and as desirable as self-sacrifice, and men and women have as much right to personal enjoyment and a full individual life as the community has to call upon their services..Perhaps the first thing to remember is that the vast majority of people to-day are simply unaware of the possibilities of fuller living which might be theirs. And this applies to service as much as to individual enjoyment. Before the war, most of us would have pooh-poohed the idea that we could enjoy hard and even dangerous work on behalf of others and the community at large. But, in spite of everything, there are to-day thousands who, though they may sometimes grumble, at heart have enjoyed fighting fires or acting as wardens or serving in canteens...To an equal extent, this unawareness is true of self-development and enjoyment. Most of us accept the world into which we are born. We may be acutely conscious that we would like a fuller life than we have got, but what we would like to fill it with consists in general merely of more of the enjoyments which our particular civilization already provides- more leisure to go to cinemas or football matches or dog-races, more opportunity to indulge little private hobbies, more money to cut more of a dash with, more opportunities of doing what the envied richer classes do with their wealth and leisure- smart display, travel cruises, expensive sport, dancing..A well-known sociologist once spoke of the "accursed wantlessness of the common people: most of us do not even know what we lack" (page 22)
But then that was surely a state of affairs that was encouraged by a situation in which- "One half of it [our society] does not know how the other half lives; except in times of war, there is little national feeling; and there is a sad absence of group awareness, group pride, or group expression in the cities and towns and rural districts of which the nation is made up".
As Professor Birnie had remarked in 1930 this was a general consequence of the history of industrialization. But the idea that people or groups could be "made to fit" into a New Order by legislation is a strange one to come from a believer in Darwinism and the inate capacity of living things to react to circumstance. For there is no comparability between human laws and 'laws of nature'. Nature shows no partiality or preference, or even fundamental purpose, and will not be swayed or deviated by protest or appeal. And English history is a long record of resistance by the common people to being 'put upon' according to the policies of central government that could be understood to be based upon frailties and failings that were only too human.
Perhaps Dr. Huxley may be excused for believing that the spirit of national unity and common purpose that he could see during "Finest Hours" represented an evolutionary change and permanent change, rather than a traditional English reaction to a "season" of war. He was after all a biologist and not an historian. For in fact the Disraelian dream of One Nation Toryism had shown once again just what the British people could achieve when they were united in a common cause.
As Dr. Huxley said: "It has been England's boast that since the Norman conquest she has evolved by creative compromise where other nations have been subject to violent revolutions." (page 27) And the result was that that 1066 was the last foreign conquest. But, as has been explained, the "creative compromise" in the national interest was often a conscious policy of toleration of difference and diversity, apart from those moments when it was necessary for 'all hands' to help to steer the 'ship of state' away from "the rocks".
LEAVE THEM LAUGHING WHEN YOU GO
But , since at least the start of the Age of Improvement, that course often been determined by the resultant force of the discourse of disaster and catastrophe that had moved politics away from the beliefs in "the common people" and the 'commonweal' that had underpinned English History. Rather it had set England clearly upon the route that would combine the strengths of the economic and political man, so much easier to handle "scientifically" in order to produce the power necessary to survive a turbulent age obsessed with power. And, as the product of his age and career in a great family tradition, Dr. Huxley could only see "perhaps the severest test in our history" as a "drastic transformation from the age of economic man to the age of social man, from individualist laissez-faire to a highly organized society". For the inter-war experience had suggested that any highly organized society would have to be based upon the State. The question was "..can we effect [the transformation] in such a way as not only to remain democratic but to raise democracy to new and heightened expression."
By the early Sixties a generation of British Students that had been at least educated and formed by the post-war New Order to enter the new improved establishment elite began to graduate and disperse into normal life, believing that it was possible that they were really going to help to really 'make a difference'.
Thus John Banham (born 1940) graduated in Natural Sciences from Cambridge in 1962 and spent some time in the Foreign Office and in industry before joining the management consultants McKinsey and Co in 1969. It was the basis for a career that would lead to his appointment as the first Controller of the Audit Commission and then Director General of the Confederation of British Industry. As such he was well-placed to see the problems of British industry during the Labour Mark 2 years, when the failure of the "In Place of Strife" initiative seemed to say it all. And, as he recounted in "The Anatomy of Change.Blueprint for a New Era" in 1995, he saw too the state of the UK as the repercussions of the new reality following the OPEC Oil Crisis of 1973 brought an end to the post-war period of heavily managed reality.
In his Preface he set the scene for his project:-
"The seeds for this book were sown twenty years ago when I was working in Washington DC, almost in the shadow of the White House..In the spring of 1975 it was time to return to London, to lead an assignment for the Central Policy Review Staff of the Cabinet Office on the future of the British car industry, which was then very much in doubt.
Although aware of the difficult times that had followed the first oil shock, I was not prepared for the talk on the BOAC flight about the possibility of a military coup; vigilantes were said to be drilling on the South Downs. When I arrived at McKinsey's London offices I found candles on the stairwells; this was in the aftermath of the three-day week when manufacturing output was virtually the same as in a supposedly 'normal' week. As I visited car assembly plants around the country I was regaled with continual stories of labour disputes...
After a few days back in Britain it was evident that I faced a choice: either to return to Washington and join the emigre community sitting it out in relative comfort; or stay and work towards a better future. I stayed and the situation worsened. Well before the winter of discontent- with cancer patients being denied treatment and stinking piles of refuse lying in the streets- the trade unions appeared to have undue and damaging influence over the national economic and political scene. The so-called 'social-contract' devised by Callaghan's Labour government turned out to be neither a contract enforceable at law nor socially responsible.
Ordinary people felt powerless to avert Britain's seemingly inexorable, if relative, economic decline and the deterioration in schools and hospitals. Managements offered a catalogue of complaints about the unions and government. Fear of the future seemed pervasive, economic failure almost to be expected. Success, like good service, came as a surprise. Very few people, other than those who had chosen their parents very carefully, enjoyed any measure of financial independence; taxes on personal incomes made it effectively impossible to build up any personal wealth except through speculation in housing. British society, and its politics, remained obsessed with class." (pages 1-2)
The "first oil shock" of 1973 had undermined the whole reality of cheap power on which both "Western" and "Eastern" blocks had come to depend. The post-war experiments had been based upon the fact that in 1945 the USA and the USSR were dominant 'superpowers' and their fortress-stances produced a kind of stability, under the threat of nuclear holocaust should either attempt to break the stalemate.
But a "Third World" had been developing, and the 'Achilles heel' of the industrial giants was that their industries, public infrastucture and the lifestyles of their people were based upon imported oil supplies. Their governments too because they reaped a greater revenue from taxes on oil than the producing countries got from selling the crude oil on which so many other industries depended. Perhaps equally important was the fact that as early as 1960 it was apparent that "A new economic, political and military force of colossal size is being created in the Far East with amazing and frightening rapidity." (Tibor Mende) Chinese Communism was different to Soviet Communism and offered its own way ahead in a world with many new variables. It all made prediction and forward planning of the kind introduced by Harold Wilson difficult if not impossible.
The answer had been to reconnect Britain with the successful tradition of English opportunism and liberty. Thus John Banham went on: "Such was the dire situation that Margaret Thatcher and the new Conservative government inherited in 1979.
To the evident surprise of most of the economic commentators and much informed opinion, by 1990 British business had been transformed by the combination of taming the trade unions, bringing public spending under control, opening up the economy to competition and giving managers both the chance to manage and the incentive to do so. A revolution had swept through Britain's boardrooms, factories, offices and high streets. Long-standing weaknesses in the economy were corrected : industrial relations imptroved out of all recognition; private investment in skills and innovation reached record levels, as did industrial productivity, manufactured exports and profits. Living standards had never been better for most families.
But in late 1990 it ended in tears. The principal architect of the Thatcher revolution was summarily removed from office. Sterling failed to maintain its position in the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System and had to be devalued amidst scenes all too reminiscent of the mid 1970's.Tens of thousands of people lost their life savings in businesses that could well have survived or prospered in Germany, France or even northern Italy; and more than a million home owners found they had mortgages for more than their properties were worth, even though home ownership had been encouraged as an investment certain to hold its value in an uncertain world.
By the end of 1993 Harold Wilson's reputation was enjoying a revival, as the resigned cynicism of the 1960's and 1970's took hold once again. Perhaps we are condemned to see our European neighbours improve their living standards faster, with our best days behind us. The improvements in most people's living standards during the 1980's might have been an illusion, purchased at the expense of investment in the future. Maybe we should expect our governments to be inept- moving from bungle to crisis, as one newspaper leader put it.
Small wonder that public confidence in those national institutions that the Thatcher revolution left largely untouched is so low, as people ask what went wrong . Parliament, the Civil Service, local government and the National Health Service are all on trial before the court of public opinion. The evidence for the prosecution is strong: a public sector borrowing requirement amounting to some £2,200 for the average household; a House of Commons that is divided over the nation's future in Europe; widespread concern about rising crime and a burgeoning underclass in many deprived inner city areas; an increase in the bureaucracy of the National Health Service, while waiting lists remain long and the latest reforms take their time to produce results." (pages- 2-3)
Naturally enough Mr Banham's response is shaped by his own education and expertise. His book is "an anatomy of change" and "a blueprint for a new era" based upon his specialist knowledge as a management consultant. But words like "symptom" and "anatomy" all point to the fact that this approach is based upon that scientific objectivity that means the kind of detachment in which the students in "The Anatomy Lesson" look on ,while a dead body is dissected so that they may achieve a post-mortem understanding of how that human body worked and then died.
On the basis of his 'post-mortem' analysis Mr Banham can conclude that "We are entering uncharted economic and political waters". But for someone dedicated to the idea of management, it was obvious that "..we must chart a new direction" even though there were no charts. In fact the secret of the success of the Thatcher Revolution was that it returned to the English traditions of lifting the cumbrous, if not dead, hand of the State, and releasing market forces and entrepreneurship once more. Once more the impulse driving the country forward could come from below, from people who wished to be more than just "the residual mass".
As Mr Banham desribes, there was a widespread feeling in the mid-Seventies in the United Kingdom that things had become unmanageable with "the nation apart" once more. Mr Heath had had even called a General Election on the issue of whether the Government or the Unions should run the country. It was tantamount to an admission of Tory failure, and the Lib-Lab pact was able to exploit it in order to return Mr Wilson to Downing Street. But it was a very weak coalition majority until Mr Wilson retired and handed over his "weak hand" to Mr Callaghan. By the 1979 General Election Margaret Thatcher was able to campaign in Churchillian style as was appropriate to "Darkest Hours", and became the first woman Prime Minister. Over the next ten years"Thatcherism" produced casualties, but, as Mr Banham outlined, it also restored much of Britain's fast diminishing capacity, only for the gains to be lost in the catastrophic collapse of 1990.
Given Mr. Banham's professional expertise and experience he could see this as a failure of the " national institutions that the Thatcher revolution left largely untouched. Parliament, the Civil Service, local government and the National Health Service". But, in fact, the malaise was a much deeper one. The lack of that strong impulse from below that had been so crucial throughout English history.
Matthew Arnold had dreamed of a flowering of a common national culture in 1869. So had Dr. Julian Huxley during the Second World War. So had Jackson and Marsden in the early Sixties. But Florence Nightingale was correct in her observation that by 1860 there was no common understanding among "the artisans" of Britain concerning the great and eternal dilemmas of human existence, the kind of consensus that seemed to underpin past and present Civilizations. And Lytton Strachey was very much in a traditional English mode in his treatment of Miss Nightingale's "three portly volumes" in which she tackled, he said, eternal differences "hitherto, curiously enough, unsolved..As one turns over these singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will kill Him with overwork" (page 166-167)
Perhaps earlier generations had applied that old English common sense maxim "if it ain't bust don't fix it": but, and this may be an intensely personal perspective, to a child born in 1944 with the world around being torn apart in a ring of violence "on which the Sun never set", with the loss of some 55 million souls to the hand of man, the world felt like it was pretty well 'busted up" and everything was 'to do'.
It felt like the Children of the Ashes were thrust into a situation summed up by the final phrase disclaimed by Sir Lawrence Olivier in Louis McNiece's late 'forties' radio play 'Christopher Columbus' - "Behold! I bring you a new world!" Earlier in the play Columbus urges his crew to observe the innocence of the natives kneeling before them and to take care not to bring the evils of the old world to this new world. But it is difficult to escape from the ghosts of the Past. By definition they have a capacity to haunt, and the only way to learn to deal with them is to understand their story, and learn lessons that may help to shape your own.
It was in this spirit that the present writer by the age of ten became convinced of the need to understand what Paramahansa Yogananda called the "negative karma" around the Earth and came to understand that the venerable old stone walls of his native Oxford housed a major aparatus created over preceding centuries for the study of Humanity and all its works. But, as Matthew Arnold realised too, and spelled out in the Scholar Gypsy, the equally venerable country environment around the "dreaming spires" also taught lessons of how Englishfolk had lived for centuries in a "green and pleasant land" in harmony with Nature, before the Age of Revolution had unleashed new and unsettling powers upon the world.
In a fragmented reality divided into 'hostile camps' the study of History offered an exploration of the common roots of an immediate world so that it might be possible to reconcile Oxford 'Town', Oxford 'Gown' and the village life, where Arnold detected the ghost of the Scholar Gypsy, into a coherent rootstock for a citizen of the Brave New World. But Oxford, as William Cobbett felt over a hundred years before, was too heavily weighted in the Past, personal and collective. Too many ghosts.
Bristol and Cardiff were cities forged largely by the nineteenth century industrial revolution: and hosted newer ghosts. And then the real challenge of the Future was still London's inner city, for such places still seemed to be the Crucible, the melting pot, which, like Lancashire in the early industrial revolution or the great melting pots of the Eastern USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, provided much of the unsettled and destabilising elements of the modern world. For the Lancashire of King Cotton had done much to sponsor and create revolutionary Socialism and Communism, and urban slums had provided fertile ground for such ideas to be nursed and nurtured.
In fact having headed for the "deprived inner city" the writer ended up working near "the front line", where many of the pupils in a 37 year teaching career were contemporary "Children of the Ashes". Not just the least favoured and most unfortunate of Huxley's British"residual mass", but 'flotsam and jetsom' from misfortune all around the globe. Some were crushed and defeated, and instinctively programmed to fight back. But very few. And it was a great blessing for someone wishing to understand the world that during that long teaching career exploring history in the inner city, it seemed that representatives from almost all over the world came to live and build their futures in South London as English men and women.
Some, like that baby-boom generation, felt the burden of living up to their parents need to believe that their sacrifices would in fact produce a better future for the next generation And some rose magnificently to the challenge. This was perhaps felt most of all by the young girl who arrived as the only member of her family to survive from the small boat on which they had cast off from Cambodia. No-one in 37 years better exemplified the power of a belief that the only way to build a better future was to live with hope and determination to make use of England as a land of opportunity where, with encouragement and empowerment, it might be possible to grow up with the ability to help to build a better Britain, as a New Model for a better world.
In 2010 that is still very much work in progress: as is my ongoing exploration of History. But the recent death of Norman Wisdom is a reminder of how this 'little man' overcame personal tragedy to cast a professional ray of sunshine over the world of the early Fifties: and how the present writer won a talent competition at Christmas 1954 singing his hit song "Don't Laugh at Me, Cause I'm a Fool."
"Some day may be, my star will shine on me.
Don't laugh at me, cause I'm a fool."
