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  The bunch of cracked, unmoving bodies, silent apart from the occasional wracking cough or the switch of spittle into the stove, were dressed in what answered for blue jackets and blue trousers . . . The jackets were shrunken, crumpled, shapeless, devoid of all buttons, thickly stained with dried soup, saliva, caked tobacco. The trousers, unsupported by belt or braces, devoid of all fly buttons, remained in position only by virtue of a chance fit between the circumference of the garment and that of the wearer’s waist. This piece of good fortune was rare . . . The blue jacket and trousers were virtually all that the patients wore. There were no vests, no shirts, no ties, no underpants, no pullovers and cardigans.

  Many of these neglected, ill-treated elderly people had, Isaacs in time came to realise, grown up in appalling, brutalising slums and then gone on to ill-treat their own children. Accordingly, ‘the result was that when the parents reached old age, the children did not feel the reciprocal bond expected of them’.3

  It was a world away from the money men in the City of London. ‘There is no justification for allegations that information about the raising of the Bank Rate was improperly disclosed to any person,’ roundly asserted Lord Justice Parker’s Tribunal report, published on 21 January, about the rumoured ‘leak’ the previous September. As for those in receipt of advance warning of the rise, ‘in every case the information disclosed was treated by the recipient as confidential and . . . no use of such information was made for the purpose of private gain’. For the government, the Bank of the England and the City, the dominant reaction was relief – the FT declaring the report had ‘utterly vindicated the reputation of the City of London for financial integrity’ – though considerable indignation persisted that the Labour opposition, and specifically Harold Wilson as Shadow Chancellor, had foisted the inquiry on them in the first place. In early February there followed, again at Labour’s request, a two-day Commons debate on the episode, with Wilson himself giving an unabashed, virtuoso performance, not least with his cricket analogy for the City, where ‘merchant bankers are treated as the gentlemen and the clearing bankers as the players using the professionals’ gate out of the pavilion’. Left unspoken, and thereafter hanging in the air for many years, was the question of whether the two main suspects, Keswick and Kindersley, had got away with it. The Bank of England’s most recent historian, Forrest Capie, suggests that the latter anyway may have done so, pointing to how the British Match Company (on whose board he sat) had for several years faithfully held around £250,000 of gilts – until it abruptly got rid of them the day before the Bank Rate hike was announced. ‘They sold that stock,’ a leading gilts broker, Sir Nigel Althaus, would recall almost half a century later, ‘and that seemed to me the absolute clincher, and I think Lord Kindersley was very lucky.’4

  On Saturday, 1 February, two days before the Commons debate got under way, London witnessed two resonant sporting moments: at Highbury a crowd of over 60,000 watched the ‘Busby Babes’ beat Arsenal 5–4 in a pulsating encounter on a mud heap, among them a 15-year-old Spurs supporter, Terry Venables, there specially to see the Manchester United powerhouse left-half Duncan Edwards, only six years older. At Twickenham there was rare booing when Australia had one England rugby player carried off and another concussed, before at the death Coventry’s Peter Jackson scored a memorable jinking, swaying try to clinch the match 9–6. The following evening saw the launch of BBC TV’s arts programme Monitor, fronted by Huw Wheldon, its very name indicative of the Reithian paternalism that still permeated the Corporation’s culture. ‘Lean, eager, sardonic and compelling,’ was one critic’s view of Wheldon, who would later be heard to remark off-screen, ‘We can’t have someone who’s overtly queer on the programme.’ As for viewers, ‘upstage’, ‘highbrow’ and generally ‘stodgy’ was the early, unenthusiastic verdict. Next day, Monday the 3rd, the trial began at the Old Bailey of three senior Brighton police officers on charges of conspiracy – a trial that eventually led to the town’s Watch Committee dismissing the chief constable – while that evening Wilfred Fienburgh died after his car had collided on Saturday night with a lamp post at Mill Hill. Tuesday featured the first nudity on British television (an excerpt on ITV from the Windmill Theatre’s current non-stop revue), while on Wednesday a 3–3 draw at Red Star Belgrade saw Manchester United through to the semi-finals of the European Cup shortly before Anthony Heap went to the first night of Graham Greene’s The Potting Shed at the Globe (‘more of a parable than a play, and a pretty preposterous one at that’). And on Thursday the 6th, Dennis Dee encountered ‘keen frosts and winds’ on his East Riding smallholding as he spent the day ‘riddling spuds’; 14-year-old George Harrison met the Quarry Men; and Captain James Thain’s twin-engined Elizabethan-class plane, chartered by Manchester United and having refuelled on the way back from Belgrade, failed to get full lift-off on the slushy runway at Munich airport.5

  The news started to come through late that chilly afternoon: some 21 feared dead, including seven players, with both Duncan Edwards and the manager Matt Busby gravely injured, and the 20-year-old Bobby Charlton among the survivors. One of the eight journalists killed was the Manchester Guardian’s Don Davies. The sports editor had originally assigned John Arlott to cover the match, but in the event ‘An Old International’, as Davies was invariably bylined, had taken Arlott’s place. That evening much of the nation was in a state of disbelieving grief, but a Keighley diarist focused on the practicalities. ‘Manchester United were to have played Wolverhampton on Saturday,’ noted Kenneth Preston. ‘That match has had to be cancelled. That will throw the League games out of gear. Then Manchester were in the running for some sort of European Cup. That will be upset.’ He drew two lessons: ‘If the aeroplane had been carrying troops we should not have heard as much about it. These accidents only go to show that man has not mastered the forces he thought he had mastered.’

  Next day, Nella Last in Barrow ‘thought with sadness of the Manchester people who died in the plane crash’, reflecting how ‘this time yesterday, wives would be shopping & planning a “welcome” meal’, while in Manchester itself a young teacher, Vincent Walmsley, recorded in his diary that ‘going through town this morning the one topic on the buses, in the streets, where people queued for papers, was yesterday’s tragedy which has, because of its unique character, shocked the world; and Manchester to the core’. Brian Redhead, at the time a youthful journalist in Manchester, would remember people ‘frozen’ in the streets on learning the news, and generally it seems to have been stoicism – the legacy of two world wars – that marked the next few days. If so, that was little thanks to the press. ‘One of the most distressing consequences of a catastrophe like the recent aeroplane accident in Munich,’ complained Malcolm Muggeridge soon afterwards, ‘is the manner in which the newspapers play it so hard that it is soon drained of all emotion, and even becomes positively repugnant.’

  The bodies were flown back to Manchester on the evening of Tuesday the 11th and taken in solemn procession to Old Trafford. In cold and rain, thousands lined the 11-mile route – many, according to a local paper, with ‘a bewildered look about them’. Eight days later a patched-up United, including emergency signings, played Sheffield Wednesday in the FA Cup and won 3-0; but although Busby was starting to pull through, the man who had been expected to captain England for much of the 1960s, Duncan Edwards, died in the early hours of the 21st.6

  Just up the road from Manchester, a historic by-election campaign had been taking place either side of the crash. ‘We do not intend to depart from our usual practice in by-elections that we do not influence voters nor report the campaigns in news bulletins,’ ran the BBC’s pompous announcement ahead of the Rochdale contest, with polling set for Wednesday the 12th, but the local commercial television station, Granada, boldly broke ranks. For the first time on British screens, it (together with ITN’s bulletins) offered something approximating full-bodied political coverage. The seat was a Tory marginal, under threat from a Labour candidate whose agent was a you
ng local councillor, Cyril Smith, while the Liberals’ (now led by Jo Grimond) candidate was the articulate, not unglamorous Ludovic Kennedy, until recently an ITN newscaster. Granada’s first election broadcast, on the 5th, was watched by over a third of the local electorate, with Kennedy coming out best in the eyes of those viewers. ‘We shall lose Rochdale, I fear, by a lot,’ privately predicted Macmillan (in Australia) on the 10th. ‘The Liberal intervention in all these by-elections is very annoying.’ Next day, eve of polling, Richard Crossman paid a visit. ‘Though the centre of Rochdale is rather fine,’ he noted, ‘the rest of it is the usual ghastly Lancashire town, with its slummy streets running up and down the hills.’ As for Granada’s big debate that evening, with ‘three journalists interrogating the three candidates’ live in the Council Chamber, he reckoned Labour’s Jack McCann was ‘easily the best’, followed by Kennedy.

  ‘I’d have liked to sit up & hear the Rochdale Election results,’ Nella Last wrote on the Wednesday evening itself before reluctantly going to bed. ‘I don’t share my husband’s optimism that the Tories will hold the seat – the Liberal will very much split the votes.’ She was right: the Tories lost to Labour, and were pushed into a bad third place, with many of their votes going to the Liberals, who enjoyed their biggest by-election vote for over 20 years. Macmillan landed at London Airport on Friday, and was soon being defended by Gerald Nabarro on Any Questions? (‘he’s an experienced tactician, an able politician, an outstanding statesman, and he’ll handle the situation, and the Tory Party will still win the next election, and by a good majority . . . LAUGHTER’), but the real story lay elsewhere. ‘The televoter is born,’ declared Kenneth Allsop that day in the Daily Mail. ‘Rochdale has changed the nature of democratic politics. Theorizing may now end. Television is established as the new hub of the hustings.’7

  Macmillan and the fellow Conservative whom he had vanquished for the keys to No. 10 were about to have a weekend of contrasting fortunes. ‘As Mr Butler entered the hall, he was welcomed by a jazz band, the bangs of exploding squibs, shouting and singing,’ reported the Evening Standard about a lively occasion on Friday the 21st at Glasgow University, where Rab Butler was due to be installed as rector and address the students. Whereupon:

  The first missiles began to fly. A tomato hit him square in the back. A flour bomb hit him full in the face.

  The barrage of missiles and noise continued throughout the ceremony and during Mr Butler’s speech. Often he stood silent, waiting a rare chance to make himself heard.

  Finally the platform party stood and bravely sang ‘God Save the Queen’. As they departed, fire extinguishers and water showered all over them.

  The Home Secretary was already being strongly criticised by many Tories for his apparent softness towards crime, and it did not help his cause when the next day’s papers featured photos of him covered in flour and soaked in foam. ‘I understand youth,’ Butler vainly protested. ‘I have children of my own and I like to feel I haven’t lost touch.’

  Macmillan meanwhile was preparing to take his chance, on Sunday the 23rd, with the first live, one-on-one television interview with a prime minister. ‘As the cameras were being lined up he derived considerable amusement from the seating arrangement,’ recalled his inquisitor, ITN’s Robin Day. ‘He complained that whereas he was sitting on a hard upright seat, I was enthroned behind the table in a comfortable swivel chair with well-padded arms. This, said the Prime Minister, seemed to symbolize the new relationship between politician and TV interviewer. He felt as if he were on the mat.’ In the 13-minute interview, Macmillan was at his relaxed, confident best, offering early on the characteristic post-Rochdale reflection that ‘at home you are a politician, abroad you are a statesman’ and later giving a calm, effective reply when Day asked him about the position of the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, who was facing even more Tory criticism than Butler: ‘I do not intend to make a change simply as a result of pressure. I don’t believe that that is wise. It is not in accordance with my idea of loyalty.’ Should Day, though, have had the nerve even to raise the issue? The Telegraph (‘Who is to draw the line at which the effort to entertain stops?’) and the Manchester Guardian (‘This may be judged a good or a bad development, according to taste, but it is certainly new’) were unsure, but the Mirror’s ‘Cassandra’ had no doubts: ‘The Idiot’s Lantern is getting too big for its ugly gleam.’ As for Macmillan, his private verdict later that evening was eloquent enough: ‘I think it went well, altho’ the questions were of the Daily Mirror type – brash & impertinent.’8

  The Liberal revival would continue in late March with Mark Bonham Carter’s dramatic by-election gain from the Tories at Torrington in north Devon. ‘A splendid meeting in a kind of barn lit by paraffin lamps,’ recorded his mother Lady Violet during a strongly rural campaign, ‘full of enthusiastic horny-handed supporters.’ Given the negative effects of the credit squeeze following the September measures, rising unemployment and the USA slipping into recession, any mid-term government was likely to be unpopular. For Macmillan, with the recalcitrant Thorneycroft gone and Heathcoat Amory likely to prove somewhat more malleable, the question was not whether to reflate but when to do so. This was certainly the case after 13 March. ‘Roy Harrod to luncheon (alone),’ the PM noted after a visit from his favourite – and loyally Keynesian – economist. ‘He is very keen that we should start to take “anti-deflationist” measures. According to him, the slump is now the enemy, not the boom. I rather share his view.’ For the moment, though, Macmillan was prepared to be cautious, knowing he had at least one pre-election budget up his sleeve.

  Nor perhaps would he have been surprised if he had been present a few weeks earlier at a small dinner at the Garrick Club that included Gaitskell and an inveterate diarist. ‘Hugh listed the reasons why those disillusioned with Toryism are not voting Labour,’ recorded Richard Crossman.

  Labour is a high taxation party, Labour is a trade union party, Labour is a nationalization party and Labour is not as sound as the Tories on the foreign issues. When asked what he would do to change this hostility to Labour, he said there was a very limited amount one could do. He himself would play down the nationalization of steel but, after all, we are a trade union party, with these views.

  Macmillan might also this spring have noted the first-quarter figures for the sales of domestic fridges: 57,000, up from 34,000 for the same period in 1957. A fridge, observed The Times, was increasingly viewed ‘as a necessity rather than a luxury’, but only one of the two main parties was psychically conditioned to be the white-goods party, the party of acquisitive consumerism, and that was not the still puritanical, producer-oriented people’s party.9

  On Friday, 14 March, the day after Harrod’s lunch at No. 10, a viscerally non-Keynesian was at Maidstone, making her third attempt since returning to the political fray – after a phase of serious disenchantment in the mid-1950s – to land a winnable Tory seat. ‘Mrs Thatcher went straight into politics, leaving only a very short time at the end of her talk for her tactics in nursing the seat,’ reported the Area Agent to Central Office. ‘She was asked about her ability to cope as a Member, having in mind the fact that she had a husband and a small family, and I do not think her reply did her a lot of good. She spoke of having an excellent nanny.’ The twins’ mother duly lost out to a ‘very pleasant, ebullient’ Old Etonian, John Wells – and, as Thatcher’s biographer John Campbell nicely puts it, ‘naturally the fact that Wells had four children under ten was not an issue’. That evening at the Woolwich Granada featured two performances by a touring package that had been on the road for the past fortnight: Buddy Holly and the Crickets; an English crooner, Gary Miller, who before the tour had been entertaining the troops in Cyprus; the Tanner Sisters, in effect the poor woman’s Beverley Sisters; the 13-piece Ronnie Keene Orchestra; and, supplying the gags and linking the acts, the relatively unknown Des O’Connor (billed as ‘Comedian with the Modern Style’). Among those at the 6.45 show was a 14-year-old from Dartford, at
tending his first concert, still known as ‘Mike’ and accompanied by a classmate, Dick Taylor. ‘Finally the Crickets appeared,’ records his biographer Christopher Sandford.

  They plugged in; they tuned up. Jagger at this stage gave one of his world-weary sighs. What, he seemed to ask, was all the fuss about? Just then Holly announced ‘That’ll Be The Day’, followed by ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘Rave On’. By the last Jagger was clapping along. During ‘Not Fade Away’ he was out of his seat, hair puffing over his eyes, miming the lyrics, showing incredible levity for one whose precept was at all times to ‘stay cool’. Leaving the cinema he went as far as to announce to Taylor, ‘That was a gas.’10

  Thatcher and Jagger: their destinies would be linked far more closely than either ever imagined.

  The package tour had ended the previous Tuesday at the Hammersmith Gaumont when on Saturday the 29th, Dennis Dee’s diary made its first reference of the year to an external event. ‘Grand National day,’ he noted. ‘Won by “Mister What” ridden by Freeman.’ Two days later Philip Larkin, back from a London trip and starting work again on ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, told Monica Jones how he had been ‘impressed afresh by the enormous cleanliness & efficiency of Southern region trains’. And on Tuesday the 1st the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop began at Maida Vale, the brainchild of Daphne Oram, who however would soon leave in protest at the Corporation rule that people could stay there for only three months, lest working with experimental sound lead to brain disturbances or even madness. Later that same day, Hancock’s Half Hour on the radio included Hancock responding to a policeman’s commonplace pronunciation of ‘garage’ by giving his own, posher version, with the second ‘a’ drawn out.11