Elizabethans

In the 2010s transgender rights became much argued about, from Parliament to the internet. Transition carries substantial legal and educational consequences. Nobody knows how many transgender people there are in Britain since no official statistics have been compiled. GIRES, an organization which tries to help transgender people, estimates the number as between 300,000 and 500,000. Whether this is an underestimate or an overestimate, their cause has been taken up by increasing numbers of young British people, often to the derision of their elders. The number of children being referred to the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service in London is said to be rising to around fifty a week. How has something once so rare become so popular? Is it because the culture is changing? Is it because drugs and surgery are so much easier to obtain?

By 2017 there were the beginnings of what seemed like a cultural war around this issue, a final extension of the permissive age, which Morris calls ‘for all its excesses, a time of joyous liberation throughout the western world’. Perhaps a useful corrective is to think back to her story and remember that, whatever the statistical count, each of these stories is a unique and individual one, which depends upon the courage, sagacity and imagination of the person concerned. A great virtue of Jan Morris is that there is no self-pity in her account, however harrowing it may at times be. She never saw herself as a victim because she was always more interested in the great world than in herself.

That, perhaps, is a lesson for all of us. There is no such thing as a typical transgender story, any more than there was a typical cavalry officer standing at the base camp of Mount Everest in 1953. This is one small example of how, by digging back a little deeper into our national history through individual stories, we can recapture some of its lost freshness. Even our recent history was rarely as straightforward as it is often painted. This is, rightly understood, a cheerful truth.

There is a breezy historiography which, broadly speaking, sees the twentieth century in Britain as an erratic but unimpeded move from darkness into light. Once we were racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and we lived in a dim, gaslit pre-liberalism. In television terms, it’s as if we have made the move from black-and-white into colour. And there is no doubt that aspects of post-war Britain were dingy. The food was meagre and tasteless, the cities were grimy, the clothes were unflattering, industrial and domestic smoke hung in the air.

We were a bit smelly. The literary critic Cyril Connolly, writing in the magazine Horizon in 1947, called London ‘the saddest of great cities’. He went on to describe its ‘miles of unpainted half-inhabited houses, its chopless chop-houses, its beerless pubs … under a sky permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover’. A recent biography of the painter Lucian Freud reminds us that the Paddington area of London where he lived during roughly the same period was run by violent gangs, and so infested with rats that he bought a Luger pistol to keep them down. A calmer, cleaner, more law-abiding Britain it certainly wasn’t. This was still the Britain of the school cane and the hangman, a Britain where homosexuals were hunted down in public toilets and publicly disgraced.

So much for the vast condescension of posterity. ‘Everything is getting better.’ But a moment of common-sense reflection tells us that the British of the early years of the Queen’s reign must have lived their lives in full colour; that the young were brimming with youth; that every variety of sexual experimentation was vigorously attempted; and that, despite the Movietone News depictions of an endless grey winter, spring kept coming around more or less on time every April.

Was it a more prejudiced country? Certainly; but black American GIs in a segregated army had been warmly welcomed into a country whose ordinary bars, cinemas and restaurants were open to all colours. Gay men, to take another example, found many ways to live full lives, deploying private languages, discretion and a culturally self-confident underworld of clubs and parties, a world now vanished. Britons may have more rights today, and be wealthier materially, but that does not make us necessarily happier, more fulfilled or more virtuous. We have a much greater understanding of our neighbouring cultures in Europe and others around the world; we consume more of their foods, books and films; but because we hover for far less time over dense, traditional texts we may also (whisper this) be shallower.

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PROPER BEHAVIOUR

The monarchy inherited by Princess Elizabeth in 1952 was almost unimaginably different from the Britain over which she was still reigning in her nineties. Two years after the war, when still a young princess, Elizabeth had given a radio broadcast from South Africa in which she declared to the former Empire that ‘my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to … the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong’. That post-imperial system was still overwhelmingly white. ‘We’ did not properly include the vast mass of impoverished Asian and African workers, certainly not black women. Yet the Queen lived to see her grandson Harry marry a mixed-race, divorced American woman, in a service at Windsor Chapel addressed by a black American pastor and featuring a black South London choir. At roughly the same time, there was a move by Oxford students to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist pioneer who had helped create British South Africa.

How one Britain became the other is an intricate story. But at its heart are values – moral judgements, behaviour towards others, personal expectations from life. Often, historians instinctively distinguish between political and economic history on the one hand – ‘the serious stuff’ – and lighter, brighter, apparently triter social history on the other. By starting with values, or ‘right behaviour’, we can see that the public sphere and the private sphere are not to be pulled apart. The Britain of 1952 was a society in which the vast majority of people felt they had a place. They might have resented that place or they might have biddably ‘known’ their place. Yet however much they may have chafed against their position in the social spectrum, people understood that certain norms of behaviour were expected – at work, in the family, in streets and in towns and villages. These covered everything from appropriate headwear to the need to keep the front doorstep spick and span, orderly queueing and daily formal greetings.

Of course, there are norms today as well; but they have changed and mean different things. In general, today’s norms are more about blurring and ignoring difference than about reinforcing it. In 1952, it would have been rude, if common, to stare at somebody unusually dressed walking down the street: today, to fail to make eye contact with someone of a different culture, and smile at them, would be thought ruder still. In 1952, to wear a bowler hat showed that you were a member of the upper-middle classes. Today, to wear a bowler hat suggests bohemian and satirical tendencies. Today, to address somebody in a coffee shop or pub as ‘Mr Jones’ or ‘Mrs Simpson’ is likely to prompt a raised eyebrow – ‘Are you trying to make fun of me?’

In 1952, to address a neighbour or shopkeeper by their first name only would be to make a daring assumption about intimacy. Today, to address someone simply by their second name – Jones or Simpson – would come across as insulting. In 1952, it would have been blandly unremarkable. Today, to turn up at work in stained jeans, with a T-shirt allowing you to display swirling arm-length tattoos, would say nothing of your social origins, although it might imply a high-value job in the tech sector or entertainment. In 1952, it would have signified that you were a filthy, jobless, unrespectable hobo. Or maybe a gypsy or a merchant seaman.

We still have our signifiers, but they crash across traditional barriers of class and employment. What was once literal has become sarcastic; and these are the norms for a more class-confused and culturally heterogeneous Britain.

This underlying sense of order in the Britain of 1952, against which many millions were already itching, was partly the result of the Second World War, which had mobilized and disciplined the British more comprehensively than ever before. A tiny little children’s booklet produced in 1955 by the now defunct News Chronicle newspaper, I-Spy People in Uniform, is like a time capsule of a different society: Girl Guides are drawn in three sharply delineated varieties, as Sea, Air and Land Rangers; a sergeant of the Boys’ Brigade is shown with white chevrons and a kepi-style cap; a bugler from the Church Lads’ Brigade sports a tasselled and emblazoned uniform that wouldn’t have disgraced a Napoleonic chasseur. Then there are pages of the various outfits and badges of the Women’s Voluntary Service, the Civil Defence Corps and Red Cross Cadets, before we reach scores of uniforms for mainstream civilian jobs, from top-hatted bank messengers to water and gas employees.

Britain was a drilled and ordered place, and the war’s direct consequences were still being felt – the continuation of rationing, a rolling mist of grey privation and the swagger-stick of National Service waving over almost all young men. Away from rural villages and suburbs, Britain was a factory-dominated industrial nation, millions of whose workers were subject to the alternative disciplines and solidarities of mass trade unionism. It was a country of clocking-on, bellowing foremen, compulsory branch meetings and the tyranny of the timesheet.

This was unusual in British history – we have rarely been a heavily organized and conspicuously law-abiding country – and it made Britain unusual in the world. Work was the most important thing. Britain was never more focused on manufacturing industry than in the 1950s and 1960s. As the historian David Edgerton has pointed out, ‘The share of manufacturing workers in total employment peaked in the 1950s, the absolute number of workers in manufacturing in the 1960s. This was British manufacturing’s moment; the moment too, of the industrial working class.’

The beginning of the 1950s saw 9.5 million people paying regular trade union dues (compared with around 6 million today, in a much larger workforce). Unions had their own clear hierarchies, and powerful, often socially conservative leaderships, whose writ ran in mines, dockyards, offices and engineering shops. Just as young men going into the Army would face bullying rituals, dramatic haircuts and parade-ground square-bashing designed to erode their individuality, so too, in thousands of factories, young apprentices would be subjected to initiation ceremonies designed to humiliate them and above all ensure that they knew their place.

A vivid sense of all this is conveyed by the former Labour politician Jack Ashley, who grew up in Widnes in Merseyside. As a child, he recalls, ‘Respect for authority was a tangible factor in our lives. Mam was anxious about any contact with people such as priests, doctors or employers. For the priest’s weekly “collection” visit, she always gave some money, no matter how impoverished we were. This was a practice I resented from a very early age.’

He then went on to work in a chemical factory owned by ICI and remembers the atmosphere for a fourteen-year-old beginning work in industrial Britain:

I began to capture the moods of industry which I came to know so intimately in the years ahead: bawdy banter, passionate arguments about football, dogmatic assertions about the job and the bosses, and an underlying sense of comradeship … The ribaldry caused me more embarrassment than it would any fourteen-year-old today. When the men had exhausted their standard repertoire of jokes about babies, busts and bottoms, left-handed spanners, sky hooks and barrow-loads of steam, we settled down to the humdrum work of the factory …

Later, he came across a classic foreman: ‘A curt, sharp-spoken man, he always wore a black suit and a dark cap. His word was law, and I was surprised at the submissiveness of the men as he issued instructions.’

Jack Ashley, this writer’s father-in-law, is a good exemplar of many working-class values in the immediate post-war period. He had known genuine poverty, brought up with his sisters by his mother in a dilapidated terraced council house, and he entered politics in 1946 as a teenage rebel councillor protesting against local Labour Party housing policies. His was an Irish Catholic family and the young Ashley, with a good singing voice, served as a choirboy. He later turned against religion, but his values and passion for justice seemed rooted in the Gospels.

It has often been argued that the 1950s were a golden age for upward social mobility, as grammar school children from poor backgrounds made it to the expanding universities. Ashley did not go to a grammar school, but having left school at fourteen for the chemical works became a crane driver: he got his chance thanks to another ladder sometimes underplayed by historians – the trade union movement, winning a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, where he got a diploma in economics in 1948, before he went to Cambridge and started work again as a researcher for the National Union of General and Municipal Workers.

Ashley had no visible lack of self-confidence about class origin: from the first time he came across public schoolboys at Cambridge and learned about mysteries such as homosexuality, he regarded the ‘posh’ as a mildly amusing form of eccentric fauna. As a young man he had been fast with his fists but, rising to become president of the Cambridge Union Society and travelling on debating tours to the United States, he became fast with his tongue as well. After a career as a producer and presenter with the BBC, he was elected Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent South in 1966. Soon afterwards, as a result of an operation that went wrong, he became profoundly deaf.

Something in his hard, early years had given Ashley abnormal determination: against all expectations, he carried on in Parliament and learned to work effectively as a backbench MP. A lifelong admirer of Harold Wilson, and spoken of at times as a possible future Labour leader himself, Jack Ashley demonstrated through a wide range of campaigns, aided by his indomitable wife Pauline, that backbenchers could achieve as much as most ministers. He became Britain’s foremost campaigner for disablement rights, as well as leading successful fights for compensation for Thalidomide victims and on behalf of victims of domestic violence and Army bullying. He was quietly but intensely patriotic, fascinated by military history and suspicious of all intellectual, ideological theories. He had been forged in a world which assumed everyone had a settled future. He simply thought that ridiculous.

The imposition of authority and hierarchy at industrial workplaces is often sidelined when compared to the effects of war and conscription; but in taming young men, and separating them from the female world, the parallel is obvious. Even in a much later television comedy, Are You Being Served?, set in a comparatively genteel department-store world, the social (and generational) hierarchies – departmental managers in stiff collars versus sarky, larky counter staff – are glaringly obvious. Another TV series from the same era – the early 1970s – On the Buses, shows the importance of work hierarchies in a very different setting: drivers and inspectors belong to different, mutually antagonistic worlds. If Britain today is a much more feminized society, this is not entirely the achievement of feminists; it is also a reflection of a fundamental shift in how people tend to spend their working days.

At the conclusion of a highly disciplined and hierarchical working week, Britons went to church. It was, compared to the country of the twenty-first century, a religious, churchgoing nation. Roughly speaking three times as many people were regularly attending Anglican services, for instance, as happens now – despite a vastly bigger population. In raw numbers, 1930 had been the high point for British church membership (an admittedly vague concept) with 10.3 million in regular attendance. But in the late 1950s the figure was almost as high, and in fact higher than church membership during the 1940s, perhaps reflecting a wish to bind and give thanks after the traumas of the war. Scotland, where the Scottish Presbyterian kirk had a strong grip, and Northern Ireland were particularly strong churchgoing societies.

Although the proportionate number of churchgoers across Britain continued to fall, it fell only gently during the late 1950s and early 1960s – perhaps thanks to a combination of the effect of the hugely popular Billy Graham Christian revivalist crusades, which each attracted more than 2 million followers, and the arrival of immigrant Irish Roman Catholics keen to attend Mass in their adoptive new home. The religious revival of the 1950s would have wider social effects. It was followed by a revived campaign against homosexuality, which in turn led to intense debates on the issue. These would lead to its decriminalization.

The big decline in church attendance came in the 1970s and afterwards. By 1990, the then Bishop of Southwark said that Britain had moved from a country ‘where Christianity is culture, to one where Christianity is choice’. Ten years later the Archbishop of Canterbury called Britain a country in which ‘a tacit atheism prevails’. It was an immense change, which perhaps we still do not understand. In 1950s Britain, churchgoing reinforced social conformity as powerfully as did factory working or National Service. Children attended Sunday school, where they were tutored in Bible stories and Christian morality. Their parents sat through sermons. Adulterers and the left-behind of broken marriages would be pointed out and embarrassed. Vicars, ministers and priests made regular visits to homes all over Britain, unannounced but expected. And whatever happened to overall churchgoing numbers, Christianity remained a powerful political and moral force throughout the Queen’s reign.

Apart from passing references to the Festival of Light, such Christian moralism is rarely made much of by historians. This is because history is so often the history of institutions, and the deeper history, of what is going on inside people’s heads, is hard to uncover. But we have the autobiographical testament of numerous political and social leaders to remind us of how important Christian values were in their lives. Of course, the very term ‘Christian values’ raises many questions. On the conservative side of the argument, its importance is perhaps better understood. The impact on Margaret Thatcher of her father’s Methodism is accepted by all her biographers.

As a young woman, she was a preacher herself. She was a sophisticated enough Christian not to assume that the Bible required any particular line in voting. But for her the Bible always had political consequences. In a speech at St Lawrence Jewry in 1978 in the City of London, she argued that higher taxation was reaching its limits and that the time was soon coming when what the taxpayer was prepared to do would be less than what the individual had been willing to give ‘from love of his neighbour. So do not be tempted to identify virtue with collectivism. I wonder whether the State services would have done as much for the man who fell among thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him?’

She had never thought that ‘Christianity equipped me with a political philosophy,’ but she thought it did equip her with standards by which political actions could be judged. Her Christianity emphasized the family rather than the collective; individual will; the virtues of hard work; private charity; and one’s duty to look after one’s own. It brought her into conflict with the Church of England in 1985, after the publication of a report commissioned by Archbishop Robert Runcie, Faith in the City. This responded to inner-city tensions by calling for more public spending and declared that ‘too much emphasis is being given to individualism, and not enough to collective obligation’. Criticizing the comfortable and well off, it argued that the exclusion of poor people was ‘pervasive and not accidental’. According to her biographer Charles Moore, Mrs Thatcher underlined these words and drew two large question marks beside them, ‘well aware that she stood accused’.

Hurt and offended by the Church’s criticism, Mrs Thatcher tried to explain herself as a Christian three years later in her so-called ‘Sermon on the Mound’ to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. She argued that Christianity was not about social reform but about spiritual redemption. She quoted St Paul’s adjuration, ‘If a man will not work he shall not eat.’ This infuriated some Scottish clerics; but what the row demonstrated, really, was that there were still very contrasting views of Christian ethics and that, as late as 1988, they mattered to both sides of the political argument. How important was it that the Good Samaritan was wealthy enough to have money in his pocket to help the man lying robbed and bleeding? Or was the instinct that sent him across the road to help his neighbour, unlike the wealthy and powerful Levite and Pharisee who had both passed by, the central part of the story?

Christianity encouraged some Conservative leaders to think harder about poorer and less powerful people, in a way that went well beyond market economics. With the exception of David Cameron, who said, quoting his then friend Boris Johnson, that his religious faith came and went like intermittent radio reception in the Chilterns (though he did so in the context of a speech robustly asserting Britain’s Christian heritage), most Tory leaders have been overtly Christian. Harold Macmillan was religious, as, in a quiet way, were Alec Douglas-Home and Edward Heath. What did this mean in policy terms? It is probably fair to say that for twentieth-century British Christians the New Testament mattered much more than the Old; and that its kernel was Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

Thus politicians who were committed to limiting the size of the state and strongly believed in individual free will, exercised in the free market, also believed that they had obligations to all their fellow citizens. Much of the consensus evident in the so-called Butskellite social policies of the 1950s and 1960s – emphasizing high employment, the role of the trade unions, welfare spending and relatively lavish support for the National Health Service – was perhaps the result of a pervasive, slightly diluted New Testament ethic running through the Tory Party. Margaret Thatcher was in this, as in so much else, a partial exception to the rule.

The influence of Christianity is even more striking on the left of British public life. Harold Wilson said that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. When it came to mid-twentieth-century Labourism, he was absolutely right. He himself had been brought up, not quite as a Methodist, but as a Congregationalist (the man who followed him as Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, was a Baptist) and was married in a chapel to the daughter of a church minister. In later life, he said that his religious views explained why he thought that high unemployment was immoral. The radical-egalitarian aspect of Christianity, the sense that everyone owes obligations to everyone else, and that everybody is equal in the sight of God, runs through modern politics as a constant, nervy source of virtuous disturbance.

Even atheists who went on to lead the Labour Party, such as Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, had strong Christian nonconformist connections – Foot’s through his Plymouth family and Kinnock’s through Welsh chapel culture. John Smith, who followed them, was a devout Christian. Among politicians we shall come to later, the effect of the New Testament on Tony Benn was profound and transforming. Tony Crosland was brought up in the strict Plymouth Brethren tradition and, although he rebelled against its puritanism, ‘thy brother’s keeper’ remained central to his political vision. Shirley Williams, another politician with a strongly ethical view of the role of politics in society, came from a devout Roman Catholic background.