Family Britain, 1951-1957 (102 page)

On 19 May 1956, 11 days after the premiere of
Look Back in Anger
, Elvis Presley entered the British charts for the first time with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, followed a fortnight later by ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ stayed in the Top 20 for the rest of the summer, but never quite made it to number 1 – unlike such mushy fare as Ronnie Hilton’s ‘No Other Love’ (four weeks), Pat Boone’s ‘I’ll Be Home’ (six weeks) and Doris Day’s ‘Whatever Will Be Will Be (Que Sera Sera)’ (five weeks). John Ravenscroft (later Peel) first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on
Two-Way Family Favourites
– where Presley was introduced as ‘the new American singing sensation’ – and the effect on him was ‘of a naked extraterrestrial walking through the door and announcing that he/she was going to live with me for the rest of my life’. There was ‘something frightening, something lewd, something seriously out of control about ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’, and alarmed though I was by Elvis, I knew I wanted more’. So too with Bill Perks (later Wyman), who on leave from National Service bought the record (shellac 78 rpm) and ‘played it with the windows to the street open until it wore out’.

The fascination with the singer himself rapidly grew as film clips of his American television appearances occasionally surfaced. ‘It was nothing but Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley,’ remembered John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi. ‘In the end I said “Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner and tea.”’ The 14-year-old Roger Daltrey, at Acton Grammar School, boldly asked a 30-year-old teacher what he thought of Elvis and got the one-word answer, ‘Disgusting’. There was also huge resistance, to rock ’n’ roll generally as well as to Elvis, within the popular music establishment, led by
Melody Maker
: first the jazz-loving Steve Race condemned ‘the cheap, nasty lyrics on which the Rock and Roll movement thrives’, and then Jack Payne (bandleader turned disc jockey) declared of Presley, ‘Personally, I don’t like his work and nor will, I feel, the vast majority of our listening public.’ But as the summer went on, the rock ’n’ roll craze became increasingly irresistible, with rock ’n’ roll dancing even at the Durham Miners’ Gala in July, under the largely tolerant gaze of more elderly onlookers. It was a craze, rapidly taken up by teddy boys, with a strongly sartorial aspect – ‘He turns revolt into a style,’ wrote Thom Gunn in 1957 in his poem ‘Elvis Presley’ – while with airplay very limited from the starchy BBC, the mushrooming coffee bars (complete with large, coin-operated American jukeboxes) played a key role in disseminating the new sound. Not all youth succumbed, however. ‘In the study I was in [at Shrewsbury School] when rock ’n’ roll entered my life,’ recalled Peel, ‘the records of choice were a recording of Handel’s Zadok the Priest from the Coronation of George VI and a recording of the same king’s magnificent wartime speech in which he quoted from the poem “A man stood at the gate of the year”.’1

After Osborne, after Presley, May 1956 still had two further cultural fireworks up its sleeve. ‘One of the most remarkable first books I have read for a long time,’ declared Cyril Connolly in the
Sunday Times
on the 27th, ‘an exhaustive and luminously intelligent study of a representative theme of our time’, portentously agreed Philip Toynbee the same day in the
Observer
, and over the next week or so there followed almost unstinting critical praise, as well as instant best-seller status. The philosophical-cum-literary treatise was Colin Wilson’s
The Outsider
, the author was 24, and he was widely (if incorrectly) rumoured to have slept nightly on Hampstead Heath while going each day to the British Museum Reading Room to research and write it. There were a couple of cooler assessments – ‘a young man has made a desperate attempt to make sense of the conflicting visions of life that have been thrown at him by an immense variety of books’, noted the
TLS
on 8 June, while a week later Kingsley Amis in the
Spectator
argued that the best cure for the adolescent, self-obsessed Outsider was ‘ordering up another bottle, attending a jam session, or getting introduced to a young lady’ – but nothing could stop the phenomenon, one of whose instant effects was to get Ronald Laing writing
The Divided Self
. It was a phenomenon that by July had become part of a broader ‘Angry Young Men’ phenomenon, essentially a publicity-driven creation that identified the very disparate figures of Osborne, Wilson and Amis as core members, though in fact they were similar only in their lower middle-class origins and robust heterosexuality. There was no place for the 42-year-old Angus Wilson, for whom 1956 was a difficult year: during the spring his play at the Royal Court,
The Mulberry Bush
, was comprehensively overshadowed by Osborne’s, while in the early summer his ambitious, Dickensian new novel,
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
, was widely praised (except by Amis, who called it ‘clearly a failure’), but somehow failed to chime with the zeitgeist.2 Still, even for an AYM the spirit of the times could shift with alarming rapidity.

May’s other firework was the first major triumph on home soil for Theatre Workshop, the company based at the Theatre Royal in Stratford (two stops on from Bethnal Green) and the creation of a remarkable working-class, left-wing visionary director, Joan Littlewood. Brendan Behan’s
The Quare Fellow
, a prison-yard drama only previously performed in Dublin, had its London debut on the 24th, with no Irishmen in the cast (which included Richard Harris and Brian Murphy), but plenty in the audience, among them several of Behan’s old IRA comrades. Reviewing the first night, Brian Inglis noted ‘an extraordinary decision to play the Irish national anthem in the middle’, with the result that ‘one section of the audience stood, wondering whether it ought to be sitting, and another section sat, wondering whether it ought to be standing’. At the end, when the mandatory ‘God Save the Queen’ was played and most people stood, the IRA contingent remained firmly seated. Behan’s unsentimental, bawdy, moving play had a considerable impact and was widely praised (including by Kenneth Tynan), with its abolitionist message having a particular resonance because of the continuing Parliamentary debate about possible suspension of the death penalty. A few weeks later, Behan himself made a famously drunken appearance on
Panorama
, where he was interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge and managed little more coherent than ‘I want a leak’, but the publicity did not damage his play, which transferred to the West End in July. ‘Just the sort of thing one might expect from the leftist Theatre Workshop to produce’ was Anthony Heap’s predictable verdict about this ‘propaganda play written by some Irish ruffian’, though he conceded that Littlewood’s production ‘makes the utmost of the very raw material on hand’.

Another Irish playwright was entertaining the sticks.
Waiting for Godot
had ended its run at the Criterion in March – ‘Couldn’t make head or tail of it,’ reported Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford after arriving ‘rather tight for the second act only’ – before in late May embarking on a provincial run, with original cast, that included weeks at Harrow, Cambridge, Bournemouth, Streatham (‘where they threw pennies on the stage on the first night’, recorded Pozzo, aka Peter Bull, ‘but never into the box-office during the week’), Golders Green and Birmingham. Week three of a testing tour that frayed the nerves of all concerned was at Britain’s premier seaside resort. Advertised as ‘inimitable’ and ‘priceless’, Beckett’s play arrived at the Grand Theatre, Blackpool on Monday, 4 June, to find itself up against stiff competition:
The Dave King Show
at the Winter Gardens Pavilion, Albert Modley (supported by Mike and Bernie Winters) starring in
Summer Showboat
at the Palace Theatre, and, twice nightly at the Central Pier,
Let’s Have Fun
with Jimmy James, Ken Dodd and Jimmy Clitheroe. It proved to be, reported the local paper, ‘one of the stormiest receptions in the theatrical history of Blackpool’, as ‘a large body of the audience beat a disorganised retreat from the auditorium, others stayed and displaying appalling manners made interjections which must have been audible to those on the stage, and some remained in their seats to enjoy this remarkable play’. It did not help that the audience included a party of OAPs, paying only a shilling each, but far from convinced by the second act that they were getting value for it, and according to Bull’s account fewer than 100 altogether of the audience were left at the end, having started at some 700. ‘We took one quick curtain,’ he added, ‘and there were rumours of the police being called out for “our special safety” as it says on some fire curtains.’ Houses for the rest of the week were very poor, and by Saturday evening the cast were so desperate to leave town that they agreed on a pause-free performance in order to catch the last London train from Preston – ‘oddly enough’, recalled Bull, ‘the only performance that seemed to go remotely well in Blackpool and, needless to say, we were on the verge of maniacal laughter throughout’.3

In the poetry world there were three signal moments this summer: at the Sheldonian in Oxford, W. H. Auden’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry – ‘1¼ hours straight down the middle of the pitch about what poetry was,’ noted Lavinia Mynors, and read out ‘inexorably in a harsh northcountry voice’; the secret marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in what she called ‘the dim little church’ of St George the Martyr in Bloomsbury; and the appearance of
New Lines
, a ‘Movement’ anthology edited by Robert Conquest, and including poems by Larkin and Amis among others, that sought, declared Conquest in his introduction, to be ‘empirical in its attitude to all that comes’ and to maintain ‘a rational structure and comprehensible language’, rejecting ‘diffuse and sentimental verbiage, or hollow technical pirouettes’. Film of the summer was undoubtedly
Reach for the Sky
, the life story of the disabled war hero Douglas Bader – ‘a very moving and stirring picture’, according to Heap, made all the better by Kenneth More’s ‘brilliant underplaying of the character’ – while a movie in prospect was the tantalising coupling of Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe in what became
The Prince and the Showgirl
. She arrived at a wet London Airport on 14 July to start filming at Pinewood, and right from the start there was little Anglo-American chemistry. ‘SLO is much too remote,’ recorded Colin Clark (son of Kenneth, brother of Alan and employed on the set in a lowly role). ‘He’s going to be her director and that should be a close relationship, but he is quite clearly not in any way concerned with her personally.’ Eight days before Monroe’s arrival,
Hancock’s Half Hour
made its small-screen debut. It was a medium for which ‘his infinitely expressive, melted-down features seemed made’, recalls an appreciative Simon Callow, and although one member of the BBC’s Viewing Panel found the first episode ‘senseless bilge from beginning to end’, most ‘praised it without reservation’. A sense of discontent, the world never quite matching up to his hopes, ran deep in the Hancock persona, and there was no shortage of Tory malcontents this summer, with mass middle-class abstentions almost losing the party a by-election at Tonbridge. ‘Those who have shouldered their “personal responsibility” and asserted the “rights of the individual” find themselves worse positioned than those who have bilked the State at every turn,’ declared a letter to the
Sunday Times
in its immediate wake, while another writer stated that as a result of the credit squeeze ‘the middle class now perceives quite clearly that it is expected to subscribe to total self-extinction’. Modernisation might or might not save the day. On 12 June, Fred Hackett from Newton-le-Willows drove his bulldozer through a hedge in a Lancashire field, marking the start of construction of the Preston Bypass – the first part of what would become the M6. ‘A road designed exclusively for the use of motor traffic’ was how, next day, the
Manchester Guardian
explained the still novel concept of ‘the motorway’.4

Through the summer, the Communist drama continued to unfold. On 20 June – ten days after the
Observer
had devoted most of the paper to printing all 26,000 words of Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech – Lawrence Daly wrote a long, heartfelt letter (subsequently published in
Tribune
) in which he explained why ‘after the most serious, prolonged and painful consideration’ he had resigned from the party. Declaring that its ‘unquestioning acceptance of the anti-Stalin criticisms’ were just ‘as reprehensible as was its previous unquestioning acceptance of every aspect of Soviet Policy while Stalin was in power’, he went on: ‘This attitude of blind loyalty to the Soviet leaders instead of loyalty to Communist principles is the basic error which has led the Communist Party to support and defend (or deny and ignore) the most colossal mistakes and monstrous crimes.’ Socialism remained, he insisted, ‘the only ultimate answer to the exploitation of man by man’, and he described ‘the genuine Communist’ as ‘immeasurably superior’ to those people who tolerated such things as ‘dictatorship in Spain and elsewhere’ or ‘the vile racial discrimination practised in South Africa’. Indeed, ‘it is the very sincerity of the Communist’s burning desire to uplift all the exploited and oppressed that has led them to approve of a heavy price being paid to achieve that end’, and although ‘that attitude has led to the most terrifying mistakes . . . the motives which inspired it should never be forgotten’.

By contrast, the historians Edward Thompson and John Saville were still within the party when in early July they brought out the first, cyclostyled issue of the
Reasoner
, subtitled
A Journal of Discussion
. The editorial, ‘Why We Are Publishing’, had a very Thompsonian ring: ‘A crisis demands crisis measures. It is now clear to all that the fullest discussion is a necessity.’ And: ‘We take our stand as Marxists.’ Thompson also contributed a piece in which, after proudly asserting that ‘our party contains within its ranks many of the best, most self-sacrificing, intelligent, and courageous representatives of the British people’, he made a key admission about the consequences of an inward-looking, sectarian culture: ‘I am
not
proud of our failure to root ourselves more deeply in British life . . . I am
not
proud of the way in which we have alienated many thousands of the best of the British people by our rigidity and our folly . . .’ Some 650 copies were produced, engendering a high degree of positive response from other disenchanted members, and by the end of the summer the two men were coming under serious party pressure not to bring out another issue.5