I have over time read a number of political biographies, memoirs and diaries of the people who helped shape the Britain of the 1970's, but this is the first time I have read a genuine history book about a time I personally lived through. The first thing to say about Sandbrook's book is that this is a genuinely scholarly record of the period. You might guess that from the length - 768 pages to cover four or five years! - and from the endnotes, which account for a 6 or 7 millimeters of the book's thickness. This is the third in a series of histories of recent modern Britain, following "Never Had It So Good" which covers the period from Suez to the Beatles, and "White Heat", an account of Swinging Britain in the late sixties. (I learn this from the cover blurb; I haven't read either of the others.)
Sandbrook's approach is 360 degrees. He covers political developments and current affairs, but also includes plenty of social history and has a constant eye for illustrations from popular culture. This means the book is peppered with references to music, and above all TV shows and sitcoms. For me this is by no means a gimmick. I was there, after all, and recall very clearly the importance, as a collective experience, of the TV is that period, a time where audiences for the three channels available were counted in tens of millions. Morecombe and Wise, The Black and White Minstrel Show, The Good Life, Rising Damp, Steptoe and Son, On the Buses, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, Play for Today, Doctor Who and so on are all genuinely revealing about British society, culture and prejudice at that time, and are, I am sure, instantly familiar to anyone of my age or more as cultural reference points.
One point on which Sandbrook is very insistent is that, in spite of all the doom and gloom, this was a period when life was getting immeasurably better for the vast majority of the population, albeit not in ways of which the cultural or intellectual elites necessarily approved, then or now. For many from the former working classes, and the middle classes in general, this was the period when they moved into new aspirational suburban homes, with inside toilets, central heating and a patch of grass to call a garden. It is easy to be scathing about this new world of housing estates and identical brick boxes, but these are the places where many of us grew up, and often it was really not a bad way to do so. One passage caught my eye in particular, prompting a "that's me!" moment of recognition. I will quote it in full, as it will strike a chord with many contemporaries:
Children in the 1970's were obviously fortunate to be growing up in an age of free state education and national health care, but they were also lucky to be growing up at a time when, thanks to the boom in living standards since the 1950s, affluence had gently trickled down the generations. Very few had to put up with the outside toilets and shared tin baths that their parents had known, and took for granted the space hoppers and chopper bikes that later became cliched emblems of the decade. (…) And although class inequalities meant that children from very rich and very poor backgrounds had very different life chances, British children in the 1970s arguably had more of a common culture than any generation before them. Rich or poor, all but a tiny minority had a stake in the world of Action Man, Star Wars and Scalextrix, yo-yos, roller skates and Sindy dolls, Uno, Mastermind and the Magna Doodle.
Another point Sandbrook makes convincingly is that, though the 1970s are invariably seen as the dour, boring, ill-tempered and culturally tasteless decade which followed the swinging sixties, in fact it was in the early seventies that the new liberties and permissiveness born in the sixties actually percolated down through society as a whole, changing the daily lives of normal people, rather than just the fringe or a cultural elite. His description of the progress of social change - attitudes to family, sex, divorce, abortion, what was then called women's liberation, pornography, race and much else - reveals just how radical were the changes which occurred in British society in that period. The Great Divide between the world of today and the old pre-sixties world in fact lies somewhere in the early to mid-seventies.
Of course, all these very valid observations are set against a background of political events of a gravity which was dimly, if at all, perceived by the likes of kids like me. I have a vague recollection of Ted Heath on the telly, everyone saying the unions were too powerful, the lights going out periodically (and us scrambling for candles), some-one called Enoch Powell who a lot of people felt strongly about and bombs going off in Northern Ireland. It was the last of these which this book taught me most about. The so-called Troubles were a constant background to my childhood and youth: there, but incomprehensible and in any case not really my problem (until later when IRA bomb scares became part of mainland life too, even in my own school). What I certainly did not realize then was just how bad the situation in Northern Ireland was, how there was a genuine fear in government circles of the situation degenerating into full-blown civil war, with a Bosnian style bloodbath possibly only a couple of nasty incidents away.
Measured against the Irish violence, the travails of the British economy in the early seventies are perhaps a lesser matter. Nonetheless, tormented by industrial unrest, dreadful management, vacillating government and years of under-investment, it is true that Britain was in a desperate situation. Heath's pragmatic reaction, which belied his proto-thatcherite reputation for being a hard-nosed free-marketeer, now seems almost unbelievably dirigiste and reveals just how far the political consensus has shifted since that time, with the great watershed here falling roughly ten years later in the Thatcher period.
All in all, this is a truly fascinating read, with the political narrative of the Heath years forming a common thread for thematic chapters dealing with, for example, race and immigration, the permissive society, women's rights, the terrible errors of town planning and dislocation of the brave new council estates, the new affluence, Northern Ireland, and much more. In the midst of all this there is the odd, withdrawn figure of Ted Heath, a politician who probably simply could not be elected today, who made many mistakes, had surprisingly little political sense, but clearly comes across as an honourable, hard-working man, but who, as a politician, was probably the most desperately unlucky individual ever to hold the office of Prime Minister. Sandbrook seems to sympathize with him, even while pinpointing his miscalculations, and essentially conveys the view that, dealt such a bad hand, no-one would have stood much of a chance of doing better.
Anyway, it's a hefty tome, but one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe you had to be there to be sufficiently interested to take this on, but many of us were. So this is for My Generation!
The Kids Were Alright, but around them a wasteland?
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