David Arscott - The 60s, A Very Peculiar History. With Added Flower Power

Title Page

THE 60S, A VERY PECULIAR HISTORY

With added flower power

Written by

David Arscott

Created and designed by David Salariya

Publisher Information

First published in Great Britain in MMXII by Book House, an imprint of

The Salariya Book Company Ltd

25 Marlborough Place, Brighton BN1 1UB

www.salariya.com

www.book-house.co.uk

Digital edition converted and distributed in 2012 by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Editor: Jamie Pitman

Assistant editor: Jodie Leyman

The Salariya Book Company Ltd MMXII

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Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. The Salariya Book Company apologises for any omissions and would be pleased, in such cases, to add an acknowledgement in future editions.

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Dedication

For Dave Marl, Sixties survivor and kindred spirit

DA

Quotes

To the detriment of almost every other group in society, the young and the beautiful picked up the 1960s and took the decade home as a toy.

Roger Hutchinson, High Sixties , 1992

Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume , 1984

The word conservative is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, nave, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the 1960s.

Norman Tebbit, MP, 1990

It was a wonderful time to be young... We all believed in Make Love, Not War. We were idealistic innocents, despite the drugs and sex.

Actress Margot Kidder

INTRODUCTION: Out of the darkness

It seems impossible to be neutral about the Sixties. The quotations above draw the battle lines: either it was a time of fruitful liberation, promising a flowering of love, equality, creativity and untrammelled self-expression, or it was a wretchedly irresponsible period, its legacy a breakdown of respect and decency, its damaging moral and social consequences still in evidence half a century later.

Although well surely agree that both positions are extreme, its only fair to the reader to come clean at the outset: this book is largely a celebration of those gloriously giddy years. The excuse, should one be needed, is my age. I was born in late 1942, and so had just turned 17 when the Sixties arrived. How could a teenager emerging from postwar British drabness fail to be stimulated by the heady promise political, cultural, economic of what was clearly a radiant new dawn?

The weary Fifties

The story has to begin in the Fifties, both in order to make sense of the sheer exuberance of what was to follow and to acknowledge that the seeds of the coming revolution had already begun to sprout.

Our parents generation (pathetically conformist, as we thought) had been battered first by the Depression and then by the Second World War. Ordinary people who had survived that conflict, whether fighting abroad or coping with enemy bombardment at home, had shown the spirit to choose a postwar government dedicated to a more egalitarian way of life the National Health Service and all that. But those early fires had already dimmed by the beginning of the following decade when the old war leader Winston Churchill was voted back into 10 Downing Street.

Most families had little spare cash, meat rationing wasnt lifted in the UK until 1954, and those who had a decent job saw no reason to rock the boat by agitating for more pay. Enough was enough.

Many things were in short supply during the early 1950s:

Fridges: Only about 15 per cent of homes had one.

Telephones: Even fewer and many shared a line with a neighbour.

Washing machines: Most women (thats the way it was!) had to do it by hand.

Televisions: Ownership was growing, but there was only one channel.

Central heating: Not since the Romans left.

As for the physical landscape, that matched the general mood. In London and other cities hammered by the Luftwaffe there were large, undeveloped bombsites sprouting weeds.

After all, the country was still paying off its war debt to the Americans (and would continue to do so until as late as 2006).

More than a million unimaginatively designed council houses were thrown up to combat postwar homelessness, many of them in a rash of new towns throughout the country. There were also some 150,000 prefabs I was brought up in one myself designed to last for ten years, but often surviving for much longer.

You never had it so good!

By the mid-1950s an economic recovery was on the way, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously told a gathering of his Conservative supporters in July 1957 that Most of our people have never had it so good.

He told his audience: Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime nor indeed in the history of this country.

He was right, but Britain wasnt yet a consumer society, and many felt that his boast was in pretty poor taste.

The American dream

This general dreariness was to give way, as the decade lengthened, to an economic boom and anyone anxious to predict what this would mean for British society in the years ahead only had to look across the Atlantic to the already prosperous USA.

During the war gum-chewing GIs had been described as overpaid, oversexed and over here. The Americans were back home now, but the exportable elements of their brash and confident culture cast a spell on many an aspirational inhabitant of this monochrome, tired little island, and especially on the young.

American films were much more lavish than anything made in the UK, and stars such as Marlon Brando and James Dean made the rebellious misfit an attractive role model in a society deadened by Cold War conformity.

Fings werent wot they used tbe!