A change is gonna come
David Kynaston takes a deep dive into 1962
Though the decade’s seismic changes were not yet under way, “On the Cusp” is an illuminating study
On the Cusp: Days of ’62. By David Kynaston. Bloomsbury; 256 pages; £18.99
DAVID KYNASTON, a social historian chronicling Britain after the second world war, will have plenty of material for the next book in the series he calls “Tales of a New Jerusalem”. After all, as the poet Philip Larkin famously said, “sexual intercourse began in 1963”—the same year as John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a year before America launched its full-scale war on North Vietnam and played host to the Beatles, and five years before demonstrations in France spawned a generation of proud soixante-huitards.
In the meantime, readers may well question Mr Kynaston’s decision to concentrate on just a few months of 1962 in “On the Cusp”, his new volume. His previous books in the “New Jerusalem” sequence covered several years at a stretch. Even the oldest of British baby-boomers, born in 1946, could scarcely imagine in 1962 the social and political changes that were to convulse the rest of the decade. Martin Luther King was yet to proclaim “I have a dream” during the March on Washington. Timothy Leary, an American psychologist, was yet to proselytise about psychedelic drugs. Though Helen Gurley Brown published “Sex and the Single Girl”, her influential book, in 1962, the sexual revolution was only just getting started.
Yet the outcome of this choice is a fascinating snapshot of a Britain in which old social and economic certainties were under threat. Mr Kynaston draws from an extraordinary range of contemporary media sources: not just newspapers such as the Guardian and the Times but also the Blackpool Gazette and Herald and the Ipswich Evening Star. Britain’s television and radio provide an often mundane background (an exception was the arrival of the provocative TW3—“That Was The Week That Was”—hosted by a young David Frost, pictured). Almost half of the nation’s teenagers sought refuge in the pop music pumped out by Radio Luxembourg.
Baby-boomers reading Mr Kynaston’s study may suffer pangs of nostalgia and perhaps the pains of recognition. Reviewing the “Coronation Street” soap opera, a critic for the Daily Herald, Dennis Potter (who went on to become a brilliant TV playwright), noted how “strange that in this slick, neon-lit age, we should find solace in the gossipy vindictiveness of old ladies in hair nets”. Yet “Coronation Street” continues to this day, while Radio Luxembourg long ago left the stage, pushed out first by pirate radio stations and then by a liberalised broadcasting spectrum in which even the BBC can now cater to all tastes.
But much of this portrait of 1962 will have faded from their memory. It is hard to recall the farming and village life described in (rather too many of) this book’s pages. By contrast, the casual racism towards immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia will show subsequent generations how attitudes have since changed for the better.
More intriguing, perhaps, is how much has remained the same. Politics was as vicious as ever, with the Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan, sacking the loyal chancellor Selwyn Lloyd and a third of the cabinet “with less notice than a housemaid” in the words of one victim. This was Macmillan’s “Night of the Long Knives”—and history repeated itself in 2019 when Boris Johnson, on his first day as prime minister, purged the cabinet of 11 ministers.
Mr Johnson’s political savagery was prompted by the European question, as divisive in 1962 as now. Macmillan, “hellbent for Europe” in the opinion of his Jamaican counterpart, challenged Britain to “take its part, and if possible a leading part, in all these new and hopeful movements”. Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell feared joining what was then the common market would be “the end of Britain as an independent nation”. But Gaitskell’s colleague, Anthony Crosland, took a different view: “We cling to every outmoded scrap of national sovereignty, play the obsolete role of an imperial power, and fail to adjust to the new, dynamic Europe.” Plus ça change.