Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-59 by David Kynaston (Bloomsbury, £25)
In the acknowledgments to Never Had It So Good (2005), his history of Britain in the late 1950s, Dominic Sandbrook recalls how a senior academic colleague at Sheffield University “solemnly advised me to cancel the contract for what he liked to call my ‘coffee-table book,’ and to devote myself instead to writing a serious scholarly article.” The anecdote is told with a kind of rueful pride, because Sandbrook’s tome was, as it turned out, rather more than a coffee-table book: it was the first weighty instalment in a sweeping narrative of recent British history, a project which now extends to four volumes, covering the period from Suez to the election of Margaret Thatcher. Not only have Sandbrook’s books been commercially successful—spawning a TV tie-in series—but they have become part of a larger trend. There is almost a surfeit, these days, of historians combing over the same ground, putting their own spin on it, and parcelling it up for the high-end commercial market. Alongside Sandbrook, chroniclers of the 1970s include Andy Beckett (When The Lights Went Out), Francis Wheen (Strange Days Indeed) and Alwyn W Turner (Crisis? What Crisis?), to name just the most celebrated handful. Moving on to the 1980s, we already have Turner’s Rejoice! Rejoice!, Richard Vinen’s Thatcher’s Britain, Andy McSmith’s No Such Thing As Society and, most recently, Graham Stewart’s Bang!. And Sandbrook is no doubt beavering away at his 1980s volume even as I write this. And there is yet another historian, of course, mining a similar vein—David Kynaston: of all the ones I’ve mentioned, he is perhaps the most ambitious and the most diligent. Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-59 is his latest, keenly-awaited offering, and we should begin by reminding ourselves of the Olympian nature of his project. Kynaston is at work on a series of books—the number as yet unspecified—called Tales of a New Jerusalem, covering the period of 1945 to 1979. “These dates,” he wrote in the preface to the first volume, “are justly iconic.” The year of 1945 marked a landslide Labour victory which enabled “the implementation over the next three years of a broadly socialist, egalitarian programme of reforms, epitomised by the creation of the National Health Service and extensive nationalisation.” (The same historical moment was recently memorialised in Ken Loach’s documentary film, The Spirit of ’45.) In 1979, “Margaret Thatcher came to power with a fierce determination to...dismantle much of the postwar settlement.” To Kynaston, then, it is clear that “the years 1945 to 1979 have become a period—a story—in their own right,” and “it is this story that Tales of a New Jerusalem is intended to tell.” His choice of the words “story” and “tales” is revealing. It’s as if Kynaston does not see his series as being a conventional, argument-driven work of historical analysis, but something more in the nature of a roman fleuve: one which seems likely to have a downbeat, bitter-sweet ending, telling of hopes gone sour; of fine, idealistic schemes unravelling and coming to nothing. While the scale and detail of Kynaston’s enterprise may put him in a league of his own (not that Sandbrook’s volumes are exactly featherweights), his work shares a number of characteristics with that of his contemporaries. A distinguishing feature of most of these histories is the seriousness with which they approach popular culture. Sandbrook and Turner, when discussing the 1970s, both write at length about the sitcoms of the period. ITV’s Love Thy Neighbour is an obvious choice: this naive, crudely ironic series about bigoted white Britons who find themselves next-door neighbours to an aspirational black family has long been a locus classicus for any examination of British race relations. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads is also plumbed for quotations illuminating social change, while the political opinions of Rigsby from Rising Damp and Alf Garnett from Till Death Us Do Part are analysed in detail to see how far they reflect the attitudes of their audience. It’s a fruitful form of historical analysis, but it also does no harm at all to the books’ popular appeal: a pre-purchase flick through the index offers a comforting rollcall of familiar pop culture landmarks to draw in middle-aged readers. Kynaston performs just as assiduous a trawl of old newspapers, often making lists of consumer goods and pop culture references rather than subjecting them to analysis. These lists are sometimes so extensive and artfully arranged that they acquire a kind of lyrical beauty in their own right: “Galaxy, Picnic, Caramac... Knorr Instant Cubes, Bettaloaf, Nimble,” begins one typical section. The guiding principle of this method is not postmodern relativism but a generous and open-minded inclusiveness. The point is not that Hotpoint Pacemakers were as important as Heathcoat-Amory’s 1959 budget speech, but that both were part of the fabric of life in late 1950s Britain, so both have their part in a history of the times. As Kynaston wrote in Austerity Britain, the story he wants to tell is “a story of ordinary citizens as well as ministers and mandarins, of consumers as well as producers, of the provinces as well as London, of the everyday as well as the seismic, of the mute and inarticulate as well as the all too fluent opinion-formers.” In support of this approach he quoted Hardy’s Preface to Poems of the Past and Present: “Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.” The idea of the historian confining himself to “humbly recording” diverse phenomena is an admirable one. Nonetheless, it would take a writer of superhuman self-discipline to do that and nothing more. As a rule Kynaston shows enormous self-restraint: he assembles and presents his material with such studied neutrality that it’s not obvious, at first, where his own loyalties lie. This means that his very occasional explicit value judgements have a powerful impact, like a trump card held back until the last moment. When he describes the critical mauling handed out to John Osborne’s 1959 musical The World of Paul Slickey, for instance, it’s quite a shock to hear him say that “the conceited Osborne had had it coming,” and referring to the work as “second-rate (or worse).” Such moments provide tantalising glimpses of the historian’s human face, but sometimes the mere organisation of Kynaston’s material is itself almost as revealing. Perhaps the best, most thought-provoking (and, tellingly, the longest) chapter in Modernity Britain is “Parity of Esteem,” which concerns the tangle Labour got itself into while formulating its education policy in the late 1950s. All the obvious and familiar participants are here—Hugh Gaitskell, Richard Crossman, Raymond Williams—but Kynaston gives equal if not greater weight to the words of more forgotten figures: the literary critic Graham Hough, for instance, whose “caustic” (and accurate) prediction was that “there will remain to the Labour party the glory of messing up the grammar schools... and of continuing the 19th-century public school system for the very few who can afford to pay for it”; and Richard Acland, the former Liberal and Labour MP whose review of Michael Young’s book The Rise of the Meritocracy Kynaston ends by quoting at considerable length: “This is the reason why the Labour party, in the present temper of the nation, does not and dare not propose to end public schools. Putting it quite brutally, they know that against such an appalling invasion of privilege and inequality, the rich would ‘go on strike’ in one way or another and bring the economic life of the community to chaos.” It seems typical of Kynaston that he should allow the final words on this critical topic to be extracted from an obscure book review by a less than well-remembered commentator, just as he makes a habit of quoting from Mass Observation sources and anonymous diarists as extensively as from leading politicians. This is when you start to realise that his writing is not as apolitical as it appears: that underpinning the whole procedure is a profound scepticism of authority—the authority, that is, of those in any kind of power, which by implication includes historians themselves. Kynaston mistrusts “opinion-formers” and that mistrust extends to writers who seek to form their readers’ opinions. All his instincts, in other words, incline towards the freedom of ordinary people to have their own voice and their own way of life. Both his politics and his philosophy of history are radically democratic. This same democratic spirit extends to his chapter titles, which are frequently culled either from pop culture (“Stone Me,” one of them is called, in an echo of Tony Hancock’s bemused despair) or from politicians’ most celebrated utterances, such as “Beastly Things, Elections” or “Never Had It So Good.” The latter phrase, of course, also furnished the title of the first volume by Dominic Sandbrook, whose own chapter titles are not so different: “I’m All Right, Jack,” “Anarchy in the UK” and “Money, Money, Money,” for instance. Meanwhile Turner’s book about the 1980s, Rejoice! Rejoice!, offers us “When Two Tribes go to War,” “Let’s Make Lots of Money” and “Walls Come Tumbling Down.” The choice of recognisable phrases from pop songs and sitcoms, rather than more drily descriptive chapter titles, signals an eagerness to reach out to readerships which might otherwise shy away from social history. And clearly the gesture is working: the popularity of Kynaston, Sandbrook, et al is impressive and in some ways heartening. Does it signify anything, however, apart from the fact that they are good writers with a knack for traversing recent history in a likeable, accessible way? Can we infer anything more interesting from their success, something which is peculiar to the times we are living through now? I can think of a couple of plausible interpretations. One is that these histories offer us an unexpected kind of consolation. Marooned as we are in a state of great political and economic uncertainty, we have become prey to a habitual sense of unease. However often we are told that history repeats itself, we never really believe it: we live in the moment, convinced that the problems we face are new and unprecedented. Modernity Britain gives the lie to this belief. It’s not just that it transports us back to an era when the cabinet was stuffed full of old Etonians comically unfamilar with the everyday anxieties of most British men and women. It shows us that in the very texture of life, in the moral temperature of the country as a whole, things were not so different back then. Here is Kynaston, for instance, quoting a BBC report on the attitude of late-1950s teenagers towards the political establishment: “Teenagers are bored by politics,” it claimed. “This is rather a bald statement, but it does seem to be true of an astonishingly large proportion of them… ‘It’s sort of corrupt.’ ‘They’re too dogmatic.’ ‘It’s all fixed.’ ‘They’re just keeping to the party line.’ At the back of it seemed to be the feeling that... they didn’t honestly believe what they [the politicians] said… and that discussion between, say, Labour and Conservative was pointless since neither was open to persuasion by the other.” Does this not equally, and exactly, encapsulate our conviction that young voters today have become detached from mainstream politics, and are already numbed by a weary cynicism about political discourse? Again and again, reading Modernity Britain, you come upon these spectral echoes of the present day: the sense of “’twas ever thus” grows inescapable, and helps to dismantle, piece by piece, one of the most pervasive and misleading fictions about our current situation: that it is somehow unique. For the other, more deep-rooted explanation of why this new breed of historian has struck such a resonant chord, we need only look at one recent, much-reported event: the death of Thatcher, and the barrage of contradictory responses it provoked in print and online. The election of Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979 provides either the fulcrum around which these books revolve, or (in the case of Kynaston) their future climax. Thatcher, so divisive while in office, remains such a contentious, polarising figure in British mythology that even now, more than 30 years later, there remains a profound fracture running through the body politic. Cameron’s line to the effect that “we are all Thatcherites now” will either strike you as a joyful affirmation or will send a shudder coursing through every fibre of your being: either way, you have to recognise that it has a certain chilling truth. However strong most of us are, individually, in our convictions on this subject, the country as a whole has still not, and cannot, make up its mind about 1979: still can’t decide whether it was the moment which saved the nation, or whether it marked a disastrously wrong turn. And, as a nation, we will probably never be “at ease with ourselves” (to use perhaps the only memorable phrase which Thatcher’s successor ever came up with) until we begin to understand that moment clearly and see it for precisely what it was. If Kynaston’s Tales of a New Jerusalem helps us to do that—if it succeeds in its objective of showing us, on a scale both panoramic and intimate, exactly what the postwar governments struggled to build, and which Thatcher, just as determinedly, sought to dismantle—then it will surely come to be seen not just as one of the present era’s most important histories, but as one of its most illuminating works of literature.
