Nick Thomas

Will the Real 1950S Please Stand Up

Speaking at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool on 8 October 1993, John Major famously (or infamously) insisted that his party stood for ‘self-reliance, decency and respect for others’ and claimed ‘we must go back to basics and the Conservative Party will lead the country back to those basics right across the board’. These ‘basics’ included ‘sound money, free trade, traditional teaching, respect for the family and the law’.1 The next day, under the headline ‘Another Golden Age That Never Was’, the Guardian observed: ‘one is increasingly stuck to know which era Mr Major really hankers after. The images are those of some dowdy Ealing comedy from the fifties, all loveable coppers and middle-class English actors putting on funny voices to play working class. Gawd bless yer, guv’nor!’2 As decades go the 1950s have something of an image problem and, if it is possible to apply such a term to a decade, have been suffering from an identity crisis for some time. The 1950s have been presented in popular and academic texts as well as by politicians in highly contradictory ways, with some buying into one or other of the contradictory views, and others seeing the contradictions as interesting in themselves. As Abigail Wills insists, ‘in both popular memory and academic scholarship, a clear division is made between 1950s affluence, tradition and stability on the one hand, and 1960s rebellion, sexual revolution and social upheaval on the other’.3 Yet even in Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ speech he complained that ‘in housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces – destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.’ The 1950s have become synonymous with growing prosperity and ‘having it so good’, shared values, respect for authority, social cohesion, community, consensus, meat and two veg suburbanism and, above all, happy families; an TH O M A S W ill th e R ea l1 95 0s P le as e S ta nd U p?

Protests Against the Vietnam War in 1960s Britain: The Relationship between Protesters and the Press

Previous attempts to understand press coverage of protests against the Vietnam War have either emphasized the struggle for self-definition that protesters were confronted with as a result of a dominant press presentation or have noted the press reversion to long-established models to explain this new phenomenon. In turn protesters were usually hostile to the press both because they felt they were misrepresented and because the press appeared to be yet another representative aspect of capitalist hegemony. Yet the relationship between the press and protesters was in many ways a symbiotic one.

‘To-Night's Big Talking Point is Still that Book’

ABSTRACT The trial of Lady Chatterleys Lover in 1960 and its subsequent publishing success sparked intense debate at the time and have come to exemplify a clash of worlds, one Victorian, repressed, deferential, restricted by class assumptions and hopelessly out of touch, the other progressive, open, liberated and, above all, permissive, that most value-laden and controversial of terms. Yet examining popular responses to Lady Chatterleys Lover reveals complex attitudes and raises questions about the permissiveness of the 1960s.

British Student Activism in the Long Sixties

Caroline M. Hoefferle’s book on student protest in Britain in the 1960s is a welcome addition to a surprisingly limited field. In recent years the literature on the 1960s has expanded at a remarkable rate, whether on permissiveness, the VietnamWar, the Civil Rights Movement or a host of other issues. Numerous books and articles have also been written about the protest movements which took place in different countries, including Martin Klimke’s various contributions on international connections, or work by David Farber and Melvin Small on the movements in the USA, to name but a few. Yet the number of publications devoted to the protest movements in Britain has remained limited, with the odd chapter here and there such as Sylvia Ellis’ contribution to Gerard J. De Groot’s Student Politics, sections in the occasional book by people such as Arthur Marwick or Mark Donnelly, and a smattering of articles, including those written by myself. While events in Britain were undoubtedly less spectacular than those in countries such as West Germany or France, they were nonetheless a cause for real concern at the time and have been important points of reference for subsequent attempts to represent or understand the British experience of the 1960s, as Hoefferle herself demonstrates convincingly. This renders the limited attention given to British student protests of this period all the more difficult to understand and Hoefferle’s book represents an important corrective to this inexplicable neglect. It also goes beyond this in adding to our understanding of the British 1960s in general, although in a rather tried and tested way. Hoefferle’s book follows a chronological structure which takes the reader from the 1950s through to the 1970s, in line with the now-established view of the ‘Long Sixties’. Hoefferle begins by setting out her view that the protests of the 1960s must be seen within the context of long-term social change dating back to the Second World War, and the evolution of protest movements such as the campaign for nuclear disarmament in the 1950s which acted as precursors to later events. She insists, entirely reasonably, that

Sex, Thugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany. By Mark Fenemore

had been established by consumers for several years. Ariel Beaujot’s essay on DuPont’s celluloid dressing-table sets (Chapter 8) reinforces this view of innovations in manufacture and design being undermined by changes in customer lifestyles, as the 1920s saw the brush set replaced by the powder compact as the paradigmatic object of modern femininity. Beaujot’s work on hairbrushes also links with that of Steve Zdatny on French hairstyles (Chapter 12). Zdatny’s essay raises some points that could have been further developed, such as the gap between Parisian trendsetters and the 25 per cent of French women who only washed their hair once a month. The restrictions of space make Zdatny’s chapter and some of the other essays rather rushed in their narrative; a more focused time span might have allowed for the examination of key themes in more detail. Had space permitted, it would also have been interesting to have had a round-table section with authors responding to each others’ findings, although some of these connections are made in the introduction. The abundance of cross-references and parallels between the essays are a strength of this volume and make it a useful starting point for research and teaching on the interaction between manufacture, design and consumption.