Eric Morse - Two Minutes to Midnight: 1953 – The Year of Living Dangerously

The Soviet H-bomb front page of the Detroit Free Press, Thursday 20 August 1953. Detroit Free Press viii

1953 is usually described as being one of the monochrome years in the early Cold War. In Britain, this meant an ostensibly comfortable, conservative, moral world where family came first, authority was respected and class barriers remained in place. The governing elite (the term establishment was not coined until two years later) could sometimes face the occasional democratic wrath of public and press, but still retained its grip on power and influence.

But even if the tide of life appeared to be flowing sedately in 1953, strong currents were developing, bringing with them major societal change in the fields of science, music, sex and sport. In the first of those, on the afternoon of Saturday 28 February in Cambridge, England, Francis Crick, a brilliant, brash 36-year-old scientist from the universitys Cavendish Laboratory, burst into The Eagle public house across the road from his lab to make a startling declaration.

Gentlemen, we have discovered the secret of life! he exclaimed to the assembled patrons, most of whom were fellow researchers, lecturers and students. By we he was referring to himself and his 24-year-old Chicago-born colleague James Watson, who was among the audience of drinkers that day in the dim surrounds of the classic, dark wood-panelled English hostelry.

Crick and Watson were already recognised as an impressive research double act; the Americans intense nature was balanced by the natural ebullience of the Englishman, which earned them the title of xii the scientific clowns around the university. Now, as Crick excitably indicated, they had made arguably the single most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century.

By dint of their own chemical reasoning, patient model-building and undoubted genius and by drawing on crucial X-ray crystallography evidence from another outstanding young scientist at Kings College London, Rosalind Franklin Crick and Watson had unravelled the double helix molecular structure of the chemical deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA.

It was already known that DNA was at the heart of every cell of almost every living thing, including those of man. This fundamental substance carried within it all the information for an organism to build, maintain and repair itself. By working out its structure, Crick and Watson had unlocked many of the mysteries of exactly how living things actually make and replicate themselves the secret of life indeed.

After the dramatic pronouncement in The Eagle, Crick and Watson went about publicising their discovery, first with a paper in the scientific magazine Nature on 25 April. Clue to the Chain of Life, the New York Times science correspondent would later write, hailing the discovery as important to biologists as uranium is to nuclear physicists.

On Saturday 18 July the arrival of a flamboyantly dressed, sultry-looking eighteen-year-old assembly worker with long greased-back hair at the home of Sun Studio on 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, would change the worlds popular music scene, and with it youth culture, for ever.

Despite his rebellious appearance, the teenager who walked into the studio that day was a shy, polite character who wanted to record a disc to present to his mother for her birthday. His name was Elvis Aaron Presley.

Young Elvis proceeded to sing the classic ballad My Happiness, made popular at the time by the Ink Spots, the well-known American xiii vocal jazz group, and recorded a second number, Thats When Your Heartaches Begin, for the flip side of his demo. Marion Keisker the studio secretary, who kept notes on artists for future opportunities, was impressed by the purity of Elviss voice. Good ballad singer Hold, she wrote, as she made an additional recording of his songs.

Presley would return to the studio in 1954 to meet its famed proprietor and record producer Sam Phillips, ultimately winning him over with a startling rockabilly version of a piece by the famed bluesman Arthur Big Boy Crudup, entitled Thats All Right Mama. This would be his first single, and within two years the hits would start to flow Heartbreak Hotel, Dont Be Cruel, Love Me Tender and All Shook Up.

The future King of Rock and Roll performed his unique blend of African-American blues, Christian gospel and country music with a free and passionate dance style, reeking raw sexuality with his unique gyrating hips. In 1953, sexuality or the public discussion of it remained more or less taboo. But all of that changed when the work of Alfred Kinsey, whose second publication, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, hit the nations bookstalls in late summer.

Fifty-nine-year-old Dr Kinsey had started his professional life as a zoologist, writing a bestselling textbook on biology (which had sold 400,000 copies) and establishing himself as the worlds number one authority on the gall wasp.

Then in 1938 he switched tack to make a study of sexual behaviour and eventually founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947. The following year he published his first report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which had sold 250,000 copies by 1953 and was translated into thirteen languages.

His follow-up was no racy publication. Human Female was 842 pages of often ponderous scientific prose, complemented by scores of tables and charts. Kinsey and his team had gleaned their information from interviews with 6,000 women, reporting findings that seemed quite xiv startling at the time, such as the fact that nearly half of the women said that they had engaged in premarital sex, and two-thirds reported they had experienced overtly sexual dreams. Female frigidity, Kinsey concluded, was man-made, not a product of innate physiological incapacity.

The book was attacked in many quarters as an affront to the dignity of womanhood. In Britain, The Times chose to ignore it completely, the Daily Express devoted an editorial to explain why it refused to print a word of the stuff, while the Sunday People which did publish its main conclusions warned its readers that those in this country should appreciate that British women are notoriously more reserved and less promiscuous than their US sisters. The Daily Mail, however, reached perhaps the wisest conclusion: Sex, it stated, is undoubtedly here to stay.

A revolution on the football field also took place on the afternoon of Wednesday 25 November at the Empire Stadium, Wembley, before an awed 105,000 spectators. This was the Match of the Century between home side England, the inventors of the game, and Hungary, the mystery men from behind the Iron Curtain who were the finest team in the world at that time.

Before the kick-off, England captain Billy Wright looked down at the oppositions footwear. He noticed that the Hungarians had on these strange, lightweight boots, cut away like slippers under the ankle bone. Turning to his colleague Stan Mortensen he commented: We should be all right here, Stan, they havent got the right kit.

Instead the hosts chased forlornly on that fogbound afternoon as the Hungarians passed and dribbled their way around them. Wright himself, normally such an unflappable defender, was left sprawling, foxed by the footwork of the brilliant Hungarian captain Ferenc Pusks as he fired in his sides third goal. This was the first instance of Total Football, and the leaden-footed and confused Englishmen would succumb to an even heavier defeat at the hands of these football revolutionaries, 71 in Budapest, six months later. xv