From Suez to the Falklands - Part 2

While the Profumo affair had been focusing prurient attention on the pecadillos of the ruling caste, a spectacle that was intensified as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were being dragged through the courts in the vindictive establishment persecution of their svengali Stephen Ward, an underground revolution had been fomenting beneath the attention of the nation's media. This was overwhelmingly a working class and lower middle class phenomenon, as teenagers, inspired by the initial supernova of rock'n'roll that had arrived from America, sought to emulate it. The original rock'n'rollers were by this time in abeyance, either dead like Buddy Holly, brought low by scandal such as Jerry Lee Lewis, or had had their careers diverted by shady managers in the manner of Elvis Presley. However, these stars, as well as their lower wattage British impersonators, had also been stymied by their own limitations, being dependent as they were on professional songwriters and lacking the imagination and musical breadth to enhance their artistic vision, which in any case tended to be minimal. In many ways the first rock'n'rollers, like so many of the itinerant musicians of the era, had simply been glorified versions of that classic American archetype, the salesman; they, like so many of their compatriots, were effectively no more than trappers drifting from town to town in the dollar hunt.

However, the new generation of British musicians represented something entirely new and unprecedented. Although it is invariably posited that the chief lure of American music to the callow, knock-kneed British teenagers of the era was its libidinal excess, the really deep attraction was in its spirituality; the residual echo of gospel in soul music and the devilish voodoo undertow of the Blues were the sense-deranging effects that really mattered. These cast a magic spell on a social cohort who had been primed to undertake mundane work, in a mundane environment, within a mundane society. If the Profumo affair had revealed how the other half lived, then popular music at least offered the potential to sample a small portion of it. However, one of the key differences that marked the new British musicians from their American inspirations was in their organisation. Whereas the American rock'n'rollers had been individuals, or at least clearly identified frontmen, the Britsh ones were agglomerated into tightly-knit bands. If the Americans were salesmen, then the British groups were gangs, and this had an important ramification in that the gang structure inherently precipitates competition to be top dog. This in turn manifests both internally within the gang itself and externally against other gangs. As the ultimate marker of status within the music industry was the quality and innovativeness of creative output, the hierarchical gang structure encouraged the members of a group to attempt to musically out-compete each other. It also paradoxically encouraged intense collaboration within each group in order to creatively out-compete their rivals, these two processes being the source of a potential chain reaction that would initially lie dormant, as groups like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones learned their chops with covers of songs from Motown, the Brill Building and the old Blues masters.

The Beatles' first top ten hit, "Please Please Me", arrived on the heels of the Ward trial, and the following year, 1964, the new music broke its bounds by dominating the domestic pop charts. It was immediately both innovative and familiar, based as it was on established American forms, but carrying its own distinctive fervour, the reaction it induced in British teenagers far exceeding the excitement elicted by the original rockers. It was also unprecedentedly well received across the Atlantic, in an America that was reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and which had its own need for ecstatic oblivion. One of the most fascinating peculiarities of the "British invasion" was the awkward manner in which straight-laced American television presenters atempted to interview the British musicians. This invariably included the basic mistake of singling out individual group members for questioning, the expectation clearly being a helpful response as both interviewer and artist collborated in a clear, coherent sales pitch. The Americans have always derived great amusement from British dentistry, but their own predilection for immaculate pearly whites is ultimately derived from their atomised sales culture; the notion that their smile is the foot in the door to greater prosperity. Salesmen have always been dismissed as vaguely disreputable in Britain, and unfortunately for the avuncular American presenters, the likes of The Animals and The Who were not salesmen. The first thing that becomes clear is that as insular gangs, the British groups have evolved private languages pitted with nuanced gaps and sentences that need the input of several members in order to be completed. In this environment, even the most basic questions ("so when did you guys meet?") generate embarrassing hesitations and lacunae, there being no desire on the part of the musicians to please the interviewer or his audience. There isn't even a basic aspiration to generate a good impression, the result being a kind of polite mutual incomprehension that nonetheless carries an undertow of hostility.

The sense of having "conquered" the home of rock'n'roll, and its accompanying vast commercial market, opened up a potentially boundless field in which the British bands could explore their creativity. However, the sense-deranging acceleration that would effloresce over the following four years, which essentially created a new art form and which has never been equalled, was also dependent on a couple of other factors. The first of these was that despite the British bands' professed veneration of their American progenitors, British rock music was essentially a strip-mining operation, drilling as it did into the deep wells of spiritual force, of mana, that lay both apparent and latent within American music. These forces were particularly deep in African-American music, having been built up over decades, or even centuries, of adversity and its corresponding fortitude. Their extraction would be ruthlessly undertaken with characteristic imperial thoroughness, the long hair of the British musicians effectively functioning as latter day pith helmets. However, this had the corollary that the British bands were in a race against time, as they had to wring as much value as possible from the source before it was used up. As such, it was not long before the dwindling reserves of mana available had to be artificially enhanced, and there were two means employed for doing this. The first was by studio experimentation, with a gallimaufry of techniques being adopted, from multi-tracking to tape manipulation, to the use of exotic instruments and synthesizers. The second, simpler, and ultimately more effective method was to literally boost the mana-effect via heightened amplification, with bands becoming focused on increasing the mass and heft of their sound. This was initiated with the assistance of amenable amplifier manufacturers such as Hi-Watt and Marshall, who gave every impression of having been providentially founded for this moment.

The other major stimulus for the accelerating musical and cultural derangement was the continuing degradation of the ruling class, which only accelerated as the Sixties proceeded. Having come to power promising the "white heat of revolution" in 1964, by 1967 the Labour government of Harold Wilson had been forced by global market pressures into devaluing Sterling, a humiliating moment that carried echoes of the Suez crisis of ten years before. Wilson's pathetic assurance to the public that "the pound in your pocket" had not been debased evoked derision, but also intensified the impression that nobody within the upper strata of society was capable of getting a grip. The social reforms undertaken by the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, which relaxed the legal restrictions on such concerns as homosexuality, abortion and divorce, were opportunistically portrayed as marking the advance of enlightened "progressive" standards. However, they were also tacit admissions that the ruling class could no longer regulate the public's private behaviour, as their moral authority was shot. This absence of authority facilitated the almost open drug culture that was essential to the development of popular music, as it simultaneously rushed towards nirvana and into the void. A half-hearted rearguard action was attempted by the authorities to circumscribe "the permissive society" with the arrest on drugs charges of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at the latter's Redlands home in 1967. However, the attempt to gaol the pair was undercut by the ruling class itself, with The Times newspaper sanctimoneously pleading "Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?". The sheer pathos of this sentiment was ultimately another manifestation of the phenomenon that had first materialised at Suez; that although the ruling class may not have liked the new world that was emerging, they liked the idea of reclaiming authority and responsibility over it even less.

If there were any remaining vestiges of the old values of duty and deference, they lay in the last lingering outposts of the Empire, and would briefly emerge in the form of one of the most extraordinary characters of the era. Colonel Colin Mitchell, the commander of the British garrison in Aden, in the present day Yemen. This port had been the first major British base east of the Suez canal, although it was now beseiged by Arab nationalist insurgents inspired by that perennial bane, Gamel Abdul Nasser. Mitchell would be accorded the epithet of "Mad Mitch" due to his anachronistic devotion to his imperial duties and his tendency to wax dolorous on the state of Britain, like a legionnaire in the Teutoberger Wald lamenting the decadence of Rome. His Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders insouciantly swaggered around Aden, intimidating all and sundry and dishing out torture and punishment beatings, as though it were still the high Victorian era. Nonetheless, Mitchell's quixotic endeavour to impose a measure of national will garnered strong approval among many sections of the public. To a British Government devoted to decline and retreat, however, he was simply an embarassment. One suspects that for such arch-technocrats as Harold Wilson and Denis Healey, their objection to imperialism was not that it was immoral, but that it was out of date. Mitchell's real crime was not that he was oppressive or brutal, but that he was old fashioned, in an era that celebrated the novel and the sensational. The Labour government's 1966 Defence White Paper had already announced the withdrawal of all British forces East of Suez, and the following year Aden would be evacuated despite, or possibly even because of, Mitchell's efforts. Unusually for a British imperial withdrawal, a sympathetic government had not been arranged in succession, and Yemen would briefly experience the Arab world's first, and only, experiment with socialism, complete with its own KGB interrogation centre. During a 1967 television interview Mitchell had perceptively linked drugs and devaluation, imparting that:

"I believe that this is the national malaise, isn't it? I mean nobody really knows what they're on back home and we watch ourselves going from being a first, second, third and how far down rate power. And it's all mixed up with everything you read about, the LSD, both sorts of LSD, and the lack of leadership".

In this at least, he wasn't wrong.

From Suez to the Falklands - Part 1

The most intensely creative and culturally explosive era of British popular culture, and therefore Western popular culture, was bounded by a pair of amphibious military operations that had enormous global and domestic political consequences. In fact, the impetus for the dramatic outburst of British pop culture was given by the first of these military adventures, and the most serious blow to its vitality was delivered by the second.

Operation Musketeer was launched on 31st October 1956 by the Anglo-French naval Task Force 345. two days subsequent to an allied Israeli incursion into Egypt across the Sinai Desert. The purpose of this combined land and sea assault was to seize Port Said at the northern end of the canal and its surrounding airfields and military installations, thereby returning the Suez Canal to French and British control following its nationalisation by the Egyptian president, Gabal Abdel Nassar, three months previously. Although sometimes erroneously described as a "military disaster", Musketeer was in purely military terms an almost clinically successful operation that proceeded like clockwork, a product not only of the accumulated experience of the British, French and Israeli forces, but also of the comparative weakness of the Egyptian army. However, it would be the diplomatic context within which Musketeer was launched that would prove its undoing.

The build up to Suez from the British perspective was characterised by two factors that the Conservative government of Anthony Eden considered vital to its eventual success. The first was to garner approval for its execution from the newly dominant Western power, the United States of America, and the second was to convince a deeply sceptical British public of its necessity. The possibility of a misunderstanding on all sides was intensified by the byzantine complexities of the local situation, and the extraordinary dexterity of Nassar in bluffing and manipulating the multifarious forces involved. These included the intense rivalry between the various Arab states to achieve regional dominance, the increasingly nationalistic demands of the local Arab populations, and the apparent expansionist aims of the newly created Jewish state of Israel. External to these factors were the desire of the former imperial powers to retain their influence, the strategy of the Soviets to increase their influence in the region, and the resulting fear on the part of the Americans of it falling under communist influence, or even succumbing to Soviet occupation.

The latter factor was the most critical to Anglo-French intentions, as it meant that the Americans were more interested in anchoring the Egyptians within the pro-Western sphere of the developing Cold War against the Soviet bloc than they were in shoring up the colonial interests of the British and French. A series of diplomatic initiatives were therefore instigated in which the major national users of the canal convened to discuss whether the canal could be placed under international control rather than be subject to continued Egyptian sovereignty. Neither Britain nor France took these discussions particularly seriously and began planning for an intervention in earnest, these being joined by Israel, who had become alarmed by the build up of the Egyptian army with weapons supplied by the Warsw Pact. In discussions with the US President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold MacMillan, had somehow managed to misinterpret Eisenhower's clear indication that the Americans would oppose any attempt to seize the canal by force, with both MacMillan and Eden convincing themselves that they would come round to an Anglo-French intervention if it were delivered as a fait accompli.

The domestic opposition to any military intervention was also being drastically underestimated, with public opinion being distinctly charry, and much influential opinion, especially within the Labour Party, being distinctly hostile. The outbreak of hostilities would see a flurry of denunciations being submitted to influential periodicals, and anti-war protests erupt nationwide. Indeed, a demonstration at Trafalgar Square, featuring a scalding condemnation delivered by the Labour parliamentarian Aneurin Bevan, would even lead to an attempt to storm 10 Downing Street. However, the unprecedented intensity of the domestic objections paled against those of the Americans, who prevented the British Government, whose monetary reserves were quickly depleting, from receiving assistance from the International Monetary Fund, while threatening to sell the US Government's sterling bond holdings. Succumbing to the pressure, Anthony Eden duly announced a ceasefire on the 6th November, without having consulting his French and Israeli allies. The British and French forces, despite having come close to securing the entire canal, would consequently withdraw over the following month in favour of a United Nations peacekeeping force, with the Egyptian ownership of the canal now being firmly secured. The common wisdom of the era would subsequently declare that Operation Muskateer had been an anachronism, a peerless example of a pair of unreformed colonial powers throwing their weight around in ignorance of their own diminished stature.

But was this correct? In hindsight, the Suez affair was a very curious one with particular regard to the British contribution. Despite providing the bulk of the forces for the operation, especially the naval elements, Britain proved to be the weakest willed of all the protagonists. Both the French and the Israelis were prepared to sit out the international pressure, and indeed the French, who were far more clear sighted about the likely response of the Americans, had previously secured international credit lines especially to resist the expected US financial pressure. If Operation Musketeer was essentially a gamble, a bluff to retain international status and prestige, the British ruling class had been suspiciously quick to fold. Whereas the French, disillusioned with the unanticipated timidity of their British allies, would turn away from the USA and invest in their Continental project, the European Economic Community, the British would submissively draw themselves further into the American orbit. There is a sense that the failure at Suez was actually something of a relief for a tired and weary British ruling class; that they were at last relieved of the burden of responsibility that came with global hegemony; that Muskateer had been, in fact, an organised collapse, a set up from the start. It should be not be forgotten, though, that this ruling class psychodrama had resulted in the death of several thousand Egyptians, most of them civilians.

As well as the loss of status on the international stage, what would come to be called the Suez Crisis had also led to a loss of domestic prestige for Britain's rulers, and this was the essential first condition for the outbreak of popular culture. It began the end of the culture of deference that had exerted an iron grip on British life, in which the low-born genuflected to the high, and the young respected their elders. The emergence of the adolescent, the teenager as a cultural phenomenon, was dependant both on the failure of the old order at Suez, and the simultaneous arrival of a new one from across the Atlantic in the form of Rock'n'Roll. As well as being the year of Operation Musketeer, 1956 was also the year when Rock'n'Roll music first began to penetrate the British pop charts. A distinct youth subculture had been emerging from the beginning of the decade with the Teddy Boys, urban youths dressed in Edwardian-style suits that had originally been produced to appeal to demobbed servicemen, and the first tremors of the energetic new American music had hit Britain in 1955 with the film The Blackboard Jungle and its hit song by Bill Haley and the Comets, Rock Around The Clock. This record is generally agreed to have fired the starting gun on the true post-war pop culture, and by the following year, the year of Suez, Elvis Presley and Little Richard had had their first top ten hits. The frenzy intensified during 1957 with the appearance of Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, the latter in particular incinerating what remained of the traditional values of duty and restraint.

Instead of looking up to a ruling class that appeared increasingly bereft in the world, British teenagers were looking towards their peers, especially those from the emerging superpower. And this revealed what would become the critical dynamic of British youth culture; that the more the ruling class struggled and the further their authority waned, then the more vital and vibrant popular culture became. This was a symbiotic relationship, and it did not take long for the avatars of the new popular culture to realise that they had a vested interest in further weakening the dwindling authority of what would become known as the establishment. Ironically enough, the ruling class were at least partially invested in this process themselves, so eager were many of them to divest themselves of their remaining inhibitions and responsibilities. Indeed, the culturial revolutionaries would increasingly find themselves pushing against an open door, especially when the Profumo affair revealed the deep moral rot at the heart of the ruling class. If the Suez Crisis had revealed an elite that seemed to have lost its touch in international relations, this latest scandal, in which a senior government minister was found to be sharing a mistress with a suspected Soviet spy, demonstrated that they had also lost any authority to lecture the lower orders on their sexual behaviour. Needless to say, this was to be a liberation for all concerned,