Harrison - Seeking a role: the United Kingdom, 1951-1970

General Editor J. M. ROBERTS

THE UNITED KINGDOM,
19511970

BRIAN HARRISON

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6dp

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Brian Harrison 2009

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First published 2009

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Harrison, Brian Howard.

Seeking a role: the United Kingdom, 19511970/Brian Harrison.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780198204763 (acidfree paper) 1. Great BritainSocial life and customs20th century. 2. Great
BritainSocial conditions20th century. 3. Great BritainForeign relations19451964. I. Title.
DA589.4.H37 2009

941.0855dc22 2008046116

Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acidfree paper by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
ISBN 9780198204763
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is the first of two volumes on British history since 1951. The second, Finding a Role?, similarly structured, will appear a year hence. It will carry the story forward in detail to 1990, and more cursorily from then to the present. Each book is selfcontained, but in Finding a Role? the reader will see how some of the tendencies traced here developed after 1970.

Reading prefaces is probably a minority taste, but writing them is a pleasure, for they enable debts to be properly acknowledged at last. Many are incurred while writing a book of this kind, and the brevity of acknowledgement cannot reflect their scale. But first, the regrets. Two are irreparable: I wish that John Roberts, who in 1993 encouraged me to set out on what turned out to be a longer journey than he expected, were alive to cheer me on at the end. I also wish that my respected colleague of more than thirty years, Andrew Glyn, could also have been with him. Our political divergence never marred a happy and (to me) fruitful relationshipso much so, that a year before his death he cheerfully volunteered to read two draft chapters and made discussing them as enjoyable for me as were the many tutorials he gave to our pupils.

My journey would have lasted even longer if a twoyear Radcliffe Fellowship in 19946 had not freed me to make a good start; and without the twoyear emeritus fellowship (20046) awarded me by that admirable institution, the Leverhulme Trust, it would have been much more difficult to get my thoughts together at the end. Much to my surprise, the Rockefeller Foundation gave me a second chance to stay for a month (March 2007) at their Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, where I had spent a memorable month in 1980; in such a superb and stimulating environment I had no excuse for not introducing still more coherence. Two Americans, Rob Hume and Tom Minsker, showed extraordinary generosity in making their indexing package available to me, and extraordinary patience in guiding me through it. The warmth in personal relations generated by such individual acts of kindness helps to scale down the huge damage the USAs reputation incurred worldwide with its friends after 2003.

Books of this kind rest on complex support networks of people whose courteous assiduity and patience frequently go unacknowledged. My demands on, and my debt to, the Bodleian Library staff, especially those at the reserve desk in the Upper Reading Room, have been accumulating for half a century. It is one of the worlds most beautiful and congenial places in which to work. If I have rarely footnoted my frequent resort to two admirable Oxford University Press reference worksthe Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biographythis is because I now resort to them as a matter of course. For decades in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Mary Davidson, Jean Bateman, and the late Phyllis Beckley carefully and uncomplainingly kept the newspapers for me; and on the computing side David Cooper, Marion Ellis, Martin Campbell, and Tony Brett cheerfully endured what must often have been (for them) painful encounters. The late Abe Aboody, of the typesetters Alliance International (Pondicherry), showed at a late stage how Indian generosity and charm still prolong an AngloIndian cultural affinity that reaches far back.

Two anonymous readers took considerable trouble with large sections (one of them with the whole) of this book and its successor while in draft. David Coleman and Alex May, selflessly generous with their time and expertise, undertook to read whole chapters; and the heavy commitments of Andrew Callingham, John Davis, Dick Holt, Alvin Jackson, Mel Johnson, Peter Savill, and John Watts did not prevent them from responding generously when asked to advise on topics where I was especially ignorant. I acknowledge my many other debts in the footnotes.

Among the Fellows of Corpus Christi College, my history colleagues Thomas CharlesEdwards and John Watts have been extraordinarily tolerantas has my wife Vicky, who must have been thankful when the final text was sent off, though she never said so. I have already dedicated my Transformation of British Politics to her, and she will Im sure forgive me if my dedication now moves on. While I was a teaching fellow of Corpus Christi College (from 1967 to 2000) a sequence of College lecturers in history, by sharing my teaching responsibilities, helped to keep my research and writing going. I am enormously grateful to them. They are a distinguished bunchor were, as two are now dead: David Englander and Tim Mason. The others are still very much alive: Ian Britain, Martin Ceadel, Martin Conway, Matthew Fforde, Martin Francis, Stephen Howe, Paul Johnson, Ross McKibbin, Joshua Sherman, Andrew Thompson, and Bernard Wasserstein. I dedicate to them and to their memory this book and its successor.