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  Two notable new books were around at the start of April. ‘This deadly analysis of managerial humbug in modern society’, was Eric Keown’s approving summary of Parkinson’s Law by C. Northcote Parkinson, with his Punch review calling it ‘a book to make the ordinary down-trodden citizen hug himself with pleasure’. The other was Ian Fleming’s Dr No, a year after From Russia With Love had catapulted him into the commercial big time. His latest provoked some severe criticism, above all from a young left-wing journalist, Paul Johnson. ‘I have just finished what is, without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read,’ began Johnson’s New Statesman piece, which argued that Dr No’s three basic ingredients, ‘all unhealthy’ and ‘all thoroughly English’, were ‘the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanized, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult’. Dr No was expected to sell half a million copies, prompting Johnson to reflect that ‘our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes [their last season just beginning], its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft model for Mr Fleming’s poison’. He might have added that a fourth key element in Fleming’s thrillers by this time was the sharp sense of regret about – and defiance against – British decline, especially following Suez. ‘At home and abroad,’ lamented 007 in From Russia With Love, ‘we don’t show any teeth anymore, only gums.’ Rapid decolonisation, moreover, was looming, and as Simon Winder puts it with pardonable exaggeration in his study of James Bond, The Man Who Saved Britain, ‘as a large part of the planet slipped from Britain’s grasp one man silently maintained the country’s reputation’.12

  For some, there was a different route to restoring national greatness.13 ‘The British of these times, so frequently hiding behind masks of sour, cheap cynicism, often seem to be waiting for something better than party squabbles and appeals to their narrow self-interest, something great and noble in its intention that would make them feel good again,’ wrote J. B. Priestley on ‘Britain and the Nuclear Bombs’ in the New Statesman in November 1957. ‘Alone, we defied Hitler; and alone we can defy this nuclear madness into which the spirit of Hitler seems to have passed, to poison the world.’ The nuclear issue had had increasing salience since the Defence Review the previous April, followed soon after by Britain’s H-bomb test at Christmas Island (‘OUR H-BANG!’, Daily Express) and then, in October, by Bevan’s renunciation of unilateralism, the direct provocation for Priestley’s much-read article. Private meetings ensued, before (on 17 February 1958) a public one took place at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, proving so popular that five overflow meetings had to be arranged. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Michael Foot, A.J.P. Taylor and Alex Comfort were among the speakers; the rhetoric was fierce and inspiring, epitomised by Taylor’s shouted claim that ‘Any man who can prepare to use those weapons should be denounced as a murderer!’ Thus the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was born as a new political and social reality – though a reader of the next morning’s Times would not have been aware of the fact.

  ‘What difference to the deterrent does our contribution make?’ Robin Day asked Macmillan the following Sunday. ‘Well, I think the independent contribution is a help,’ he replied. ‘It gives us a better position in the world, it gives us a better position in the United States, and it puts us where we ought to be, in a position of a great power.’ Soon afterwards Anthony Wedgwood Benn resigned from the Labour front bench – not a unilateralist, yet morally unable to endorse the potential use of nuclear weapons – while Priestley by the end of March was complaining of how over the past few weeks the anti-CND establishment had been ‘hurling wild accusations, making a personal issue of it from the word Go’, with ‘emotional’ and ‘hysterical’ the two most favoured derogatory epithets. Among CND’s many well-known supporters was John Arlott. ‘So long as atomic weapons are competitive everybody is going to want them,’ he told the Any Questions? audience at Bournemouth Town Hall on 4 April. ‘I reckon in the end everybody will get them and sooner or later if that happens, one hot-headed maniac will drop one and that will be the end.’14

  The programme went out on Good Friday, and that morning some 4,000 had gathered in Trafalgar Square for the start of a four-day, 45-mile protest march (organised from the offices of Peace News) to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. ‘This can be the greatest march in English history,’ declared Michael Foot from the plinth on Nelson’s Column, while among those on the first stage was Kenneth Tynan, ‘cigarette authoritatively held at the ready’ according to the Manchester Guardian, which went on to quote Mrs Anne Collins of Gillingham, pushing her small daughter in a pushchair: ‘“I’ve been thinking about this for ten years,” she said, a humble yet fixed light in her eyes. “If I become a grandmother I don’t want a bomb to drop on her and her children – I don’t want to drop bombs on the Russians, either. I’d rather let the Communists take over.” A trifle falteringly she walked on.’ There were still 2,000 marching by the end of the day, but numbers thinned to 700 or fewer during a miserably cold, wet, even snowy Saturday. ‘We came down the Bath Road to London Airport in the rain under the dripping skeletons of trees,’ reported John Gale in the Observer. ‘But we were mighty cheerful’ as ‘a scratch band played “It Takes a Worried Man to sing a Worried Song,” and the notes of the clarinet floated clearly’. Among those at the front were the Rev. Donald Soper, the march’s organiser Pat Arrowsmith (‘astonishingly young, with black hair, a bright face, a pack on her back, a pale mauve raincoat and red luminous socks’), and ‘a spruce-bearded figure with grey hair, cap and a fur-lined tank jacket, a master from Tonbridge School’. Generally, noted Gale, there were ‘a lot of girls with long hair and earnest expressions’.

  Two days later, on Easter Monday, the numerically reinforced marchers – still singing ‘Don’t you hear the H-bomb’s thunder/Echo like the crack of doom?’, the opening lines of a song for the march by the young science-fiction writer John Brunner – were met on a field outside the research station by a large band of waiting supporters. Tynan had been an early drop-out, but he now arrived by taxi, joining Christopher Logue and Doris Lessing for an impromptu picnic, while in the background a loudspeaker proclaimed the march’s message: ‘Lift up your heads and be proud. The lead has been given to the English people. Britain must take up that lead in the world. “England arise! The long, long night is over.”’ Inspiriting, patriotic words (quoting Edward Carpenter), but soon afterwards a rival megaphone, manned by the right-wing twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, boomed out an alternative message from the roof of their Mercedes: ‘Each one of you is increasing the risk of nuclear war. You are playing Khrushchev’s game. Moscow is making use of you.’ Enraged marchers attacked the car, causing £150 worth of damage before they were forcibly removed by stewards.15

  The emergence of CND did nothing for Labour unity. ‘At sixes and sevens’, was Wedgwood Benn’s post-Aldermaston assessment of where the party stood over the nuclear issue, while Aneurin Bevan as shadow Foreign Secretary – his head and his heart facing in opposite directions – now had to perform (as Denis Healey later put it) ‘prodigious acrobatics in a vain attempt to straddle the divide between unilateralist and multilateralist’. Constituency parties were far from unanimous in following Gaitskell’s firmly multilateralist lead: in Greenwich one ambitious would-be MP, Richard Marsh, secured the nomination through wearing a prominent CND badge at his selection meeting. Either way, many CNDers were instinctively reluctant to have their cause identified too closely with Labour, let alone taken over – even though, realistically, unilateralism could only become British policy if Labour was converted to it. There was a telling moment when the march stopped in Reading: after a collection had been taken, a local party official announced that the proceeds would be divided between CND and Labour, but this produced such outrage that instead all the money went to CND. This attitude reflected in part the movement’
s strongly youthful composition, certainly in terms of marchers (one of whom was a cloth-capped student from Bradford College of Art, 22-year-old David Hockney). Indeed, the grass-roots membership as a whole would never be susceptible to central control, but was instead, as Stephen Woodhams has illuminatingly argued, ‘the expression of individual desires and beliefs’ – an individuality that ‘might be seen to parallel the drive toward personal expression in wider social patterns ranging from consumer capitalism to modes of school learning’. CND was, in short, a precursor to the counterculture of the 1960s, with all of that phenomenon’s diverse political implications and legacies.

  ‘“Nuclear Disarmament” seems to be a purely middle-class show,’ commented one observer of the pre-march gathering in Trafalgar Square, observing that banners came from districts like Hampstead or Finchley, while ‘the only banner from a less bourgeois area – Woolwich – was borne by the local National Union of Teacher’s. A.J.P. Taylor came reluctantly to agree. ‘The Campaign is a movement of eggheads for eggheads,’ he reflected in June, after several weeks of addressing crowded meetings around the country. ‘We get a few trade union leaders, themselves crypto-eggheads. We get no industrial workers.’ It was somehow emblematic that Pat Arrowsmith herself was a product of Cheltenham Ladies College, albeit a serial rule-breaker while there. Moreover, even within the progressive middle class (and not just the Labour Party), there were divided views. ‘They would take what loot they wanted, set up their bases and leave the population to rot,’ was Kingsley Amis’s prediction about what the Russians would do if there was no nuclear deterrent, adding that ‘they would simply suppress the BBC and the Press, not to mention shooting half a million chaps out of hand’, while in north London during the march, recorded Phyllis Willmott, Michael Young ‘went on Good Friday and Saturday, coming back each night to sleep in his bed’. But she and Peter ‘could not decide whether his protest was good or useful or not’.

  How did people at large view the unilateralist cause? ‘All recent Gallup Polls seem to show,’ noted Mollie Panter-Downes a fortnight after the march, ‘that while the British public’s heart may have its reasons for sympathizing with the Aldermaston marchers, solid British reason has not forgotten the lesson of the disarmament of the thirties.’ Generally, the evidence was of around three opponents of unilateralism to every supporter. ‘Interested silence’ was, according to John Gale, the main characteristic of people watching the march, and he ended his report with a haunting question: ‘People mainly watched and thought and wondered at the children in the rain. “Look at them there, those little children. But it won’t make any difference. There’ll be a war if there’s going to be one.” But will there?’16

  ‘You can hear people banging doors – it is like guns going off,’ declared Mrs Grace to the Coventry Standard in its January 1958 profile of Bell Green, one of the recently built council housing estates on the city’s outskirts. Complaining about theft and inadequate drying facilities, and predicting that the estate would become ‘another slum area’, she announced that she and her husband were ‘saving up to move as soon as we can’. Next week it was the turn of the Willenhall estate, where, as in Bell Green, the blocks of flats, mainly four storeys, prompted considerable dissatisfaction:

  I have a small baby. I can’t get her outside at all unless I push her right round the back of the flats, where I can leave the pram under the window. (Mrs M. Lennon)

  I can’t do any washing – there is no boiler at all. It’s awful to have to pay so much money for a place like this. I would sooner be in a little cottage than this place. (Mrs Amy Spencer)

  Among the well-intentioned activators, Michael Young continued to insist that the problems on such relatively low-density estates, mainly peopled by tenants transplanted from high-density inner-city areas, went far beyond an absence of physical amenities, even if the housing itself was satisfactory. ‘Migration of this particular kind gives rise to great problems of mental health,’ he had recently told a conference, adding that ‘it would be almost fair to talk of a new disease – housing estate neurosis – because it is in some parts of the country assuming such dimensions that it is worthy of a name of its own’. In May 1958, his Home Service radio programme with Peter Willmott, ‘Families on the Move’, so starkly contrasted warm, tight-knit Bethnal Green with cold, atomised Debden that, as the Observer put it, ‘the narrator’s conclusion, that resettlement is a great thing but not at the expense of the old neighbourliness, sounded powerful and incontrovertible after the recordings’.

  Three months later, in August, the first families moved on to a new estate on Oxford’s eastern outskirts, Blackbird Leys. Many tenants came from areas of the city lately cleared of slums, notably St Ebbe’s, to the vexation of those tenants who had come to Oxford to work at Cowley’s prosperous, expanding car plants. ‘I don’t like it up here getting all the tail end,’ insisted one. ‘It’s a disgusting place. Putting all the backend up here won’t give people like us a chance to make this a decent place to live.’ Stigmatised from the start, and utterly remote from the dreaming spires, Blackbird Leys would suffer acutely from vandalism while it was being completed. ‘For four years,’ recorded a local paper in 1962, ‘acres of unlit buildings sites, inadequate police supervision, parental apathy and the provision of a public house catering mainly for young people, has provided a perfect setting for the idle, the mischievous, and the more sinister night people.’17

  For those who, unlike Young, were pushing hard for dispersal and low density, the jewels in the crown were of course the New Towns – which, by 1958, were starting to change significantly. Take Stevenage, becoming not only more urban (with the first shops around the belatedly developed Town Square opening in June) but also more individualistic. The AGM of the Stevenage Residents’ Federation attracted only 30 people, representing 0.1 per cent of the town’s population; the Stevenage Echo, a seemingly well-established campaigning forum, closed; campaigns themselves became increasingly social rather than political, typified by the start of the Stevenage Nursery Association; and it was reported that ‘gossip fences (or anti-gossip fences) six-feet high are being erected [by the Development Corporation] at the request of tenants who want privacy’, with these fences ‘being built around all the gardens’. There was also the thorny question of class. In Crawley the Development Corporation reluctantly accepted that it had no alternative but to give developers a freer hand if professionals, wanting appropriate private housing, were to be permanently attracted – an acceptance that in effect led to the town being divided into separate zones of public and private housing, as opposed to the previous policy of ‘pepper-potting’ private, unsubsidised houses through the estates. Much the same was happening in Harlow. ‘When the town began they had this idea of mixing the executive-cum-business-man type of houses with those of the workers,’ the Harlow Citizen’s editor explained to the Daily Mail. ‘Human nature being what it is, the policy hasn’t really succeeded. Now the house-building trend is towards segregation.’ Or, as Mrs Ferguson, the wife of a local security officer, put it, ‘In our neighbourhood, one side of the road is working-class and the other is rather middle-class. When the children come out to play you find they keep to their own sides of the street, as if a line were drawn down the centre.’

  At this stage the only second-generation New Town in the offing was Cumbernauld, near Glasgow. Preliminary planning proposals appeared in May, and tellingly all the major facilities were to be concentrated in the central, hilltop area – an implicit abandonment of the neighbourhood planning, with its socially balanced neighbourhood units, that had dominated the idealistic thinking behind the first-generation New Towns.18

  More generally in the built environment, 1958 was the year when modernism indisputably entered the mainstream. ‘“Modern” architecture of second and lower degrees of originality is now so universally accepted that even planning officers approve it,’ rather sardonically noted the Architects’ Journal in March, before asserting flatly that ‘“
Modern” architecture is now the accepted style.’ Over the next few months, three new buildings helped to validate this claim: Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre, a municipal venture hailed by Kenneth Tynan as ‘a beautiful box of steel and glass and timber’; Gatwick Airport’s steel-and-glass terminal building, according to the ultra-modernist Reyner Banham ‘so up-to-date it shames the tatty old BEA Dakotas on the tarmac’; and, at fusty Lord’s, the gently modern, nicely curving Warner Stand, which according to Sir Pelham Warner himself avoided being one of those ‘huge skyscraping stands which would turn the ground into something approaching a cockpit’. An increasingly ripe modernist target was the expanding world of higher education. In April the Architects’ Journal found it ‘encouraging’ that the design for a new lecture block at Manchester College of Science and Technology was ‘uncompromisingly modern’, but not long afterwards lamented how the almost completed Nuffield College in Oxford would ‘stand as lasting evidence of a great industrialist’s fear of progress in architecture’. And from June the process was under way of drawing up a shortlist of potential architects for the massive rebuilding of Leeds University, with only modernists being seriously considered.19

  The pursuit of modernity was quickening everywhere, it seemed. In Westminster a pilot scheme for parking meters was trialled, 23 years after they had first been used in America; near Luton the M1 began to be built, eventually by some 7,000 workers, mainly from Ireland; in Nottingham the city began to ‘inflict on itself’, in Simon Jenkins’s words, ‘the absurd Maid Marian Way, cutting the old centre from the castle mound and destroying, among a warren of streets, an exquisite set of Queen Anne almshouses’; in Ilford there was the first move towards a comprehensive redevelopment of the central area, above all to upgrade the shopping facilities; on Tyneside a local paper applauded how ‘out of the jumble of small shops and Arab-owned coffee bars, the new and ultra-modern South Shields Market Place has begun to emerge’, with ‘the hotch-potch of buildings along the north-west corner’ being ‘swept away to make room for a concrete and glass office block’; in Birmingham the decision to demolish the Market Hall, splendid and Victorian, opened the way for an ambitious redevelopment of the city centre; across England and Wales over 55,000 houses were demolished in slum clearance areas, often in northern cities; in Edinburgh three young local architects won the competition for a major housing development at the Port of Leith, where the two resulting 21-storey towers (Cairngorm and Grampian Houses) would dominate the huge Leith Fort estate; and in Bethnal Green the new, high-rise Dorset estate, the borough’s largest, was named after the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Bethnal Green was also host to Denys Lasdun’s pioneering, controversial ‘cluster’ blocks: an 8-storey one in Usk Street and a 16-storey one (Keeling House) in Claredale Street, with the latter being topped out in August, as the Union Jack was flown, the mayor and mayoress looked on benignly, and the 200 workers celebrated with a pint. ‘The thing was radically broken up, this building, into four discrete connected towers, each semi-d on a floor, each a maisonette, so that they were moving into homes not so very different from what they were used to, updated on sanitary stuff,’ Lasdun would recall about his explicitly social purpose. ‘It was an attempt to get some of the quality of life retained as distinct from being treated like a statistical pawn in a great prism.’20