WATERLOO SUNRISE: London from the sixties to Thatcher

John Davis

ISBN 978-0-691-22379-7  Princeton

Reviewed by Alan Dent

 

Sixteen chapters which examine varying aspects of London during the specified period. Davis bases his arguments on detailed, fascinating evidence. He avoids over-arching theory and draws no easy conclusions. His forte is to root out what was happening, recount it in accessible terms and, by and large, let the evidence speak for itself. No doubt convinced Thatcherites or orthodox Marxists will find matter here to confirm their pre-conceptions. Davis isn’t concerned to fit his account into a rigid grid, but he’s recounting what happened in the capital of a leading economy during a transformative period. There was a culture of profit-seeking, one of social justice, one of what might be called hedonism. The mix is curious but what comes through is a sense of the limits of human action. Davis’s book may help confirm David Hume’s view that from culture to culture there is great uniformity among us.  

In 1962 the Thames estuary received some five hundred million gallons of sewage every day. Such was “swinging London.” The “swinging” bit was extremely restricted; most people were living not too far from bomb sites, or in houses with damp or no bathrooms, or in dismal streets well away from the excitement of the cultural hubs. Nor was the swinging bit for the old: Desmond Wilcox of BBC’s Man Alive said he felt “incredibly old and defeated” when he turned 30 in 1961. Pop music, fashion, interior design, television, the media in general were populated by the young. Nik Cohn made £10,000 a year from freelance journalism. Some from the lower echelons could force their way in, Mary Quant’s parents were teachers, but nothing much had changed. It was still easier to make your way if you came from the upper reaches of wealth and income.  

What was happening in London was picked up elsewhere, though Davis confines himself to capital. Nevertheless, much of what he has to say applies to Britain. There are nuances and in some regards big differences, but the arc of history he describes touched virtually everyone to some degree.  

The Canadian sculptor Maryan Kantaroff arrived in Chelsea in 1958 and found people  “very, very busy” at being artists and intellectuals of one kind or another and displaying their sexual liberation, “You must meet so-and-so, he’s a fantastic lover.” The pretentiousness and narcissism are obvious. These were not serious people. There was regression to childish irresponsibility and self-indulgence. Edna O’Brien was in Putney, which she described as an “outpost for Bohemians”. Bohemianism was always tinged with posturing, as Flaubert exposes in L’Education Sentimentale, but what an ambitious, sharp-elbowed go-getter like O’Brien might have to do with it is hard to imagine.  

Superficially, it looked as though a New-Boy network was in the making. Commoners were marrying royalty or so it was claimed when Anthony Armstrong-Jones landed the chain-smoking, flighty socialite. Little was changing. Money and contacts still ruled. Armstrong-Jones had been to Eton. The Evening Standard wrote of a New Elite, arty folk climbing the greasy pole: Peter Hall, John Cranko, David Hicks, Mark Boxer etc. Hall was privately educated, Hicks, son of a stockbroker went to Charterhouse, Boxer to Berkhamsted. Plus ça change.  There was real change in the air: the young were challenging outworn norms, the opposition to the Vietnam War was deep and serious, the feminist movement was getting off the ground, racism was being confronted, the notion that the pursuit of personal wealth should be the main aim in life was shaken; but Howard Zinn’s astute comment applies to all these – change is brought about by “countless small acts by unknown people”. It’s the forgotten millions who were mounting a real challenge, the high-profile were too concerned with their wealth and image.  

The first espresso machine was introduced to South Soho in 1953 (Davis’s period is elastic), heralding the coffee-bar boom. By 1961 there were about twenty-four strip joints in the West End. Paul Raymond, the scouse vulgarian, introduced Julie Mendez’s snake act to try to outbid the competition. Samuel Bloom, a fellow purveyor of cheap titillation, was given a three-year prison sentence for promoting an excessively explicit act. Tempest Storm, a hard-working stripper, was making £1,000 a week in 1960. One stripper, in 1965, told the Evening Standard she was doing twenty-six strips a day.  A few women claimed to enjoy it, but most were contemptuous of the men, seeing them as pathetic types and despising being leered at. On the one hand, degraded commercialism in which women become mere flesh to arouse the fantasies of inadequate men, on the other, the heavy-hand hopelessness of the authorities. Fines and prison sentences couldn’t hold back demand. The trade flourished on the desperately confused and morally abject sexual culture. Women were willing to strip because, by and large, there were few opportunities to earn good money, men were eager to ogle because their view of women and of their own sexuality was adolescent and lacking in character. There had been a long tradition of salacious entertainment as a way of parting men from their wages but the commercialism of the period amplified and drove it forward.

Biba opened in 1964 and closed in 1975 because its parent company, British Land, saw greater profit in a different use of the building. Biba and businesses like it exploited the youth market. Post-war prosperity meant kids had a bit of disposable income. So-called entrepreneurs wanted to get their hands on it. Of course, the tastes of the young are fickle. Lots of boutiques came and went. Those which tried to be more part of the counter-culture than a business, found that the money passing over the counter was what mattered.

Davis sees this, along with the invasion of Soho by strip joints as “the death of the sixties”. What’s he’s intimating throughout the book is that the ‘80s were born in the ‘60s. The groundwork for Thatcher’s flimsy edifice of putative “free-market” politics was laid when the Beatles were singing All You Need Is Love. The book marshals a great deal of evidence in support. People may be surprised to find that mass council house sales were promoted by the GLC under Horace Cutler from 1967, in imitation of what had already been done in Birmingham. Housing is one of the most interesting focuses of the book. In the early sixties, many Londoners were happy to rent, owning being viewed as something of a burden. The 1957 Rent Act was the beginning of change. Ironically, the Tory effort to help landlords led to an increase in owner-occupiers. When rent controls were removed, tenants started to do the arithmetic. Tax relief on mortgages made buying a reasonable prospect. Ben Parkin, the Labour MP who had been significant in bringing Rachmanism into public view, argued that housing should become part of the Welfare State. Bevan had prefigured this during his time as housing minister by toying with a nationalising the entire housing stock. Possible in the years immediately after 1945, today the State couldn’t afford it, the nation’s housing being worth more than four times the annual GDP. A huge amount of wealth has become reified in bricks and mortar and the inequitable distribution of property is fundamental to inequality in general. Maybe the details about housing are so compelling because it is fundamental: if you don’t have a place to live, you don’t have anything. From that point of view, Beven and Parkin were on the right track: while houses are investments rather than places to live, the radical inequality of our society won’t be fixed.

 Equally fascinating are the sections on “race” and “racism”. We ought to find different terms as “race” doesn’t exist. It’s a misleading shorthand because it reinforces the notion of a basic biological difference between people with black or white skins, which is scientific nonsense. The details about the difficulties faced by black people in the capital, youngsters stopped for no reason, the Met stitching up coloured people as a matter of course, are shocking. The Notting Hill riots of 1958 and 1976 were both tragic and heartening: on the one hand the poor relations between the coloured people and the prevailing culture is a terrible indictment, on the other, the organisation of the black community to celebrate its own culture was terrific.  

Davis explores too how changes hollowed out support for the Labour Party, how London cabbies, once union men, were slowly transformed into Thatcherites, how community based, direct action pointed to an alternative to machine politics. He even gives  a mention to John “Hoppy” Hopkins who, though privately educated, set up the London Free School which led to the creation of the Notting Hill Carnival. His thesis is correct: the basis for Thatcherism was laid during the sixties and seventies, but he fails to finger the real culprits. Above all it was Callaghan and Healey who cleared the way for the grocer’s daughter. Labour won twice in 1974 on a manifesto promising a shift of wealth and power to working people and their families. By 1976, the PM and Chancellor were slashing public spending and imposing pay restraint on some of the poorest paid. No wonder when Thatcher promised tax cuts people changed allegiance.  

The book can’t be faulted for its scholarship or its lively style. It’s a marvellous compendium for anyone at all interested in the period. A reference book but much better than that sounds: readable, stimulating, a great contribution to debate.