Elizabethans

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Andrew Marr 2020

Extract from Jan Morris’s Conundrum (Faber & Faber Ltd) used with the kind permission of the publisher

Extract from Robin Morgan’s ‘Monster’, Monster: Poems (Random House and Vintage Press, 1971). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the author

Cover design: Jo Thomson

Andrew Marr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008298401

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008298425

Version: 2020-09-03

Dedication

In memory of William Donald Marr, 1930–2020,

a wonderful father and a fine Elizabethan.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: The Crown and the Corona

PART ONE: ELIZABETHANS AT HOME

1. Mountains to Climb

2. Proper Behaviour

3. A Word on Americans

4. Between Catastrophe and Golden Age

5. On Our Uppers

6. Upper Class in the 1950s

7. Nancy, and How to Speak Proper

8. British Shinto

9. Diana and Ruth

10. The Ballad of Stephen Ward

11. Punishment by Acquittal

12. The David and Jonathan of Permissive Britain

13. Schooling: The First Defeat of Socialism

14. The Rebel Conservative

15. Graham, a Very Naughty Boy?

16. Other Homosexualities

17. Hashtag MeToo and the Story of Ted

18. The British Journalist

19. Bad Behaviour: Real Women Break Through

20. Out of Control: New Ways of Misbehaving

21. Lara Croft and Her Boys

PART TWO: ELIZABETHANS IN THE WORLD

22. Does Britain Have Friends?

23. Mountbatten and the Navy

24. New-Fangled Wars, Old-Fashioned Heroes

25. Bob the Good

26. Women and War

27. Getting Out

28. The Empire Loyalist

29. Farrokh Bomi Bulsara

30. Jayaben Desai

31. The Idea of a Nation

32. The Leaping Salmond

33. The Rev. Dan Dare

34. Elizabeth David, Good Eating and Europe

35. Europa, and British Europeans

36. The British California

37. Churchill, European Dreamer

38. The Road to Brexit

39. Brexit Warriors

40. From Burning Tower to Hostile Environment

41. Khadija Saye

PART THREE: ELIZABETHANS AT WORK

42. Didn’t We Do Well?

43. ‘Houses and Meat and Not Being Scuppered’

44. Cathode Tubes and Isotopes: New Ways of Making

45. Crash! Sir Geoffrey de Havilland

46. The Robot We Never Used

47. Bernard and Norah: Let’s Have Some Fun

48. To Potter is to Fly

49. How Others Saw Us

50. Success and Failure on the River Clyde

51. When We Made Great Ships

52. Clive Sinclair: Make it Small

53. The Rest of Creation

54. Anita and the Kindly Market

55. Ridley Scott

56. Nice Boys, Really?

57. Outlandish Fruit

58. The Queen of the Curve

59. Strong Suckers and Raspberries: Making It Here

60. A Networked Nation?

61. Posh and Him

62. Beyond the Market

63. A Future

Picture Section

Index

Acknowledgements

Cover Image Credits

About the Author

Also by Andrew Marr

About the Publisher

Introduction:

THE CROWN AND THE CORONA

On the evening of 5 April 2020, speaking at Windsor Castle and attended by a single BBC cameraman hidden behind protective clothing, Queen Elizabeth II gave the fourth televised address of her reign outside her annual Christmas messages. She was talking to the British about coronavirus, as deaths soared and most of her subjects chafed indoors under tight government restrictions. Her subject was patriotism. As she was speaking, her Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was being taken to St Thomas’s Hospital in London, where he would be placed briefly in intensive care, as his coronavirus symptoms worsened.

The Queen was too subtle to compare the coronavirus crisis directly with wartime conditions. Indeed, she emphasized the difference: ‘This time we join with all nations across the globe in a common endeavour using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal.’ However, the separation of family made necessary by social distancing and the general lockdown in homes made her, she said, think back to the broadcast she had made during the Second World War to the evacuee children.

The Queen repeated the government’s key messages about staying at home and supporting the NHS – she had not spent her life as head of state for nothing – before making her central patriotic appeal.

In the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say, the Britons of this generation were as strong as any; that the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humoured resolve and of fellow feeling, still characterize this country. The pride in who we are is not part of our past. It defines our present and future.

This is without doubt how most British people would like to think of themselves. The Queen went on to mention specifically the then regular 8 p.m. Thursday applause for NHS and key workers, which would be ‘remembered as an expression of our national spirit’.

‘Our national spirit’ is quite close to being the subject of this book. Exceptionalism – how different are we? – is the staple question of all national history. Yet, in modern circumstances and particularly during a global pandemic, it may be the wrong question.

Most developed human societies are moving in roughly the same direction when it comes to their economies, attitudes to fairness and rights, and their failures, particularly over the environment. There are renegade countries and dissenting civilizations, such as Hungary, Russia and China – far more so than when the ‘end of history’ was vaingloriously proclaimed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But among liberal democracies today’s Elizabethan Britain is broadly in the mainstream. After Brexit, it is still (much) more like other European cultures than unlike.

So let us turn to that Thursday applause, both origin and object. It should not be too much of a surprise that inspiration came not from a native Briton but from Annemarie Plas, a thirty-six-year-old Dutch software saleswoman and yoga teacher, who got the idea from friends in the Netherlands. Her message, sent by a variety of social media, read: ‘Please join us on 26th March at 8pm for a big applause (from front doors, garden, balcony, windows, living rooms, etc) to show all the nurses, doctors, GPs, and carers our appreciation for their ongoing hard work and fight against the virus.’

All over Britain, huge numbers of people heeded her call. Soon, among those standing on their doorsteps or in their houses to clap were many members of the Queen’s family, the Prime Minister and actors such as Daniel Craig. Television channels made a point of stopping normal programming to record it.

It was heartwarming and proper, and made most British people feel better. But it wasn’t a specifically British thing. Locked-down individuals and families in virus-hit Lombardy, in southern Italy and in Spain had done similar things – as, of course, had the Dutch.

Then there are the identities of those who were being applauded. As the New York Times reported three days after the Queen’s address, of the first eight doctors who died in Britain of coronavirus while treating it, all were immigrants here. Lists of those who had died began to appear in newspapers. One, in the Daily Telegraph, at around the time of the Queen’s address, included the following names: Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, a fifty-three-year-old Muslim consultant virologist working in Romford Essex, who had recently warned the government about the lack of personal protection equipment in hospitals; Edmond Adedeji, sixty-two, working in Swindon; Fayez Ayache, seventy-six, who had migrated from Syria, working in Ipswich; Alice Kit Tak Ong, a seventy-year-old nurse from Hong Kong, working in the Royal Free Hospital in North London; Jitendra Rathod, fifty-eight, a heart surgeon working at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff; Alfa Saadu, from Nigeria, still working at sixty-eight in the Whittington Hospital North London; and Adil El Tayar, a sixty-three-year-old Sudanese doctor working in Middlesex. The New York Times listed the countries from which the first dead had come as being India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Sudan.

Again, anyone familiar with modern Britain would be unsurprised by that list. The British National Health Service has long relied on doctors and nurses who have migrated here from poorer countries. European medical staff, at the beginning of the epidemic, may well have gone back to their own health services to help; and sadly it is not a surprise that immigrant doctors were on the front line doing some of the most dangerous jobs when it struck. But had something similar happened in the early years of the Queen’s reign, then the surnames of the dead doctors would have been more likely to read Wilkins, Smith, Walker, McDonald, Davies, Jones.

When we talk about the experience of the British in 2020, we’re talking about a different people compared to when we talk about the experience of the British in, say, 1950. Contemporary Britain is unusual in European terms in its porousness to migration from non-European parts of the world, for obvious historical reasons. The reader may argue that the essence of modern Britishness is in neither surnames nor radically different behaviour, but in subtler matters: taste in food and drink, humour, propensity to queue or, in the Queen’s words, self-discipline and quiet good-humoured resolve.

There is a lot in that. But it is easily overdone. As lockdowns took place first of all in Italy, France and Spain, the online jokes, cod videos and memes showed that Gallic, Iberian and Lombard humour weren’t much different from British – and just as funny. They felt, reacted and joked just like us. They were as self-disciplined and grumbled just as much. They revered, and applauded, their doctors and nurses just as we did.

One area in which the British response to coronavirus did seem remarkable was when the government asked for volunteers to aid the NHS, deliver food and medicines to the most vulnerable and help keep basic services running. Within a few days 750,000 people had signed up to help, more than three times ministers’ original target. Here, if anywhere, was a whiff of the exceptional. Yet all across France the ‘solidaires’ were doing much the same thing. In the United States, local volunteering networks had sprung up in Minnesota and spread a system of mutual aid from state to state. In Italy, when the government asked for volunteer doctors for the front line, more than 8,000 immediately signed up, while non-medical citizens volunteered to help in other ways through the Protezione Civile and by distributing food. Human nature is pretty much the same the world over. A border-ignoring pandemic seems to make it more so.

The year of the pandemic raised more interesting issues than whether countries were culturally very different. Across Britain, it brought people more together for a common purpose. For many of us it was the first time in which the demands of community and common purpose clearly outstripped the daily prodding for profit and self-advancement. People did start to look to their neighbours, buying and delivering food to the vulnerable, performing innumerable acts of kindness. More important than who the British were exactly in 2020 was perhaps how they thought about themselves and their country. This bigger picture did include some kind of revived patriotism, to which the Queen was speaking.

But there were other storm clouds ahead. The coronavirus lockdown seemed likely to provoke a major recession. As this book was completed during the lockdown, it is hard yet to be sure. Perhaps Britain will bounce back economically more quickly and more vigorously than the current economic consensus expects. But vast numbers of businesses suddenly found their income drying up; and a government spending spree to try to support them would eventually, everybody knew, have to be repaid. Inside the Treasury, the mood was bleak. Within a month of the lockdown, 2 million people had already lost their jobs. One former Bank of England adviser, David Blanchflower, predicted that unemployment could hit more than 6 million and the experience would be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Whether that proves to be the case or not, the year of coronavirus provoked questions about equality, fairness and all-in-it-togetherness. More of those on the front line who were infected came from minority communities. Then there was the division during the lockdown between those living in the gardenless apartments or tower blocks, observing Britain through windows only, and the more affluent with gardens or even second homes. There was a divide between the older, on whose behalf the lockdown was being implemented, and younger Britons losing their jobs, social lives and hopes for the future. There was a division between the naturally obedient, carefully observing government advice and reporting on errant neighbours, and the disobedient, disinclined to believe ‘experts’ and ready to believe conspiracy theories flying around online. Finally, there was the division between those who observed the epidemic from a distance – if infected, barely noticing the fact – and those who died, or whose relatives and loved ones did. The gap between those who experienced coronavirus essentially as a public-policy news story and those ripped in pieces by it – a misery scale running from inconvenience to screaming disaster – was the biggest inequality of all.

Many of those issues of class, fairness, conformity, immigration and culture are at the centre of this book. Alongside those, it investigates attitudes to work, gender, sexuality and ‘abroad’. To do so, I have been looking at individual lives, the Elizabethans of the title. It has been a genuinely painful process of selection. There are many eminent Britons, from the trade unionist Jack Jones to the artist Barbara Hepworth or the newspaper editor Paul Dacre, who deserved space but haven’t received it. Sometimes that is because they are very well known and have already been well described elsewhere or it is because they have featured in another book I have written. More often, it is simply because I found somebody different to do the same job in this particular history of attitudes. Inevitably, the selection is partial, random and personal, but I hope readers will find it an interesting and thought-provoking slant on contemporary Britain.

The book covers the period between the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and 2020, when she was ninety-four. The reign of a monarch is an unusual measurement of time. Even for historians, centuries, decades or individual years have become more popular. But when a monarch has been on the throne for a long time, as in the case of Queen Elizabeth II, then that measurement, a reign’s-length, becomes more useful than quirky. The period from 1952 to today is, for most British people, at least as long as their adult consciousness of being alive. It’s a lifetime’s-worth. So to ask the questions – What were we like then? How different are we today? And how did that Britain become this Britain? – makes sense.

Most histories of this period focus heavily on the established systems of power, the well-known critical turning points – Suez, the arrival in power of Margaret Thatcher – and changes in consumer behaviour, from holidays to cars. This one is slightly different. I have called it Elizabethans for two reasons. First, it invites us to think of ourselves as people in history, just as much part of our period as the late Tudors were. Yes, we are the second-time-around Elizabethans, or the ‘new Elizabethans’, but we won’t be new for very long. We will be, ourselves, part of history quite soon. Second, the plural is key: I want to tell the story of change through the histories of the individual people.

Why? Social change can seem an abstract concept, as if we all move together in a mass or block. Textbook sociology suggests that we become less religious together, we become more accepting of sexual minorities together and so on, a swooping, twisting, thickening murmuration of attitudinal starlings moving through human history. That’s an unfair caricature, perhaps, but there’s an element of truth in it. And yet every shift in thinking or behaviour is led, then shaped and then confirmed by individual lives, fundamentally solitary experiences. In short, the single bird turns first. Brave or reckless pioneers thrust ahead; other individuals may resist and fight back. Very often the pioneers make mistakes and are promptly outstripped and forgotten. But sometimes they are veering, only half consciously, in the direction the rest of the flock will then follow. Such people, often good, sometimes bad, are the subject of this book.

For instance, we live at a time when women are trying to negotiate lives in which they are both sexual actors and yet also in control of their own destinies. The ‘It Girl’ who appears on front covers and reality TV shows, and is knowingly complicit in her own Instagram brand, has become, for better or worse, a kind of role model. Where did that start? For me, it was right at the beginning of the Queen’s reign with the story of that remarkable, knowing and very tough cookie Diana Dors. But if hers seems too self-congratulatory a story, what about somebody else, in many ways like her (and for a time her friend), Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain? Together, they tell a story of some of the perils and opportunities for women in the 1950s.

Or take the great arguments about the shape of the economy and society in the 1970s, between socialists and Conservatives. These tend to be examined through the prism of general election results and the views of the dominant Westminster leaders – what Heath thought, what Wilson did. But unless you understand how Jimmy Reid, the charismatic communist who led the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in, or Jayaben Desai at Grunwick really thought and how they hoped things would turn out, then you are missing a crucial perspective.

What I have been trying to capture here is often subtle. We all understand the big, visible changes. Hats disappear. Airports become gigantic as millions fly on foreign holidays or take regular business trips abroad. The number of British people with brown or black skins increases fast. Churches empty. Mosques spring up. All of these things are a significant part of our story and must be recorded. If we really want to know how we have changed as a people however, we should dig a little deeper. At some point in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for instance, the British seem to become cheekier, even rebellious. An insolent contempt for established authority begins to creep in. Why? Is it the hangover of irritation about uniformed dolts making bad decisions during the Second World War? That was certainly Spike Milligan’s motivation. But was something else going on? That is worth looking at.

Then there is patriotism in itself. Back then, there did seem to be a clearer understanding of what it meant to be British. It had much to do with swankier, more preening institutions, with bigger flags and brighter brands – the monarchy, the armed forces, the still-present if subsiding Empire. But, under all that, we just felt unEuropean. We felt ourselves to be more private, less exhibitionist than the continentals. We were, and we proudly acknowledged it, more class-conscious. We read and judged one another via minuscule gradations of vowel sound and language, impenetrable to outsiders. Our television dramas and our popular novels are about little else. Compared to coarse Germanic guffaws or the regrettable lewdness of the French, we felt our sense of humour was finer, flint-dry. Our art, from Piper to Britten, was sparer and leaner. Our ritual year was shaped by a Church very different from continental Lutheranism or southern Catholicism. These things were true for the English middle classes: were they true, at all, for working-class Britons, for the Scots, for the Welsh and so on? And if they were not, was there really such a thing as ‘the British people’?

These are hard questions, and I can’t pretend in what follows to have convincingly answered all of them. If I have an end point, it is to ask what it means to be British today. Whom do we admire? Whom do we applaud? Whom do we especially dislike? And here one unmistakable, tousled, deeply divisive and noisy figure elbows his way as ever to the front of the queue. Fresh from his brief confrontation with mortality at St Thomas’s Hospital, Boris Johnson grabs us by the lapels and demands to be inspected.

Here is a man born of intellectual and liberal-minded parents, whose early years tell us much about the Britain of the 1960s. At the time when we were, however reluctantly, accepting American leadership of the world, Boris Johnson was born in New York and spent some time being brought up in Connecticut while his father was working for the World Bank. For most of his adult life he kept an American passport and has publicly speculated about emigrating to the US. But his Americanism goes deeper than citizenship rights. His instinctive belief that everything will get better, a bouncy, untethered optimism, is a far more American than an English trait. Although Boris Johnson is no Donald Trump, Trump recognized a fellow spirit.