Daily Mail, January 2, 2016
In myth it has become a fabled age – a time of pretty girls in mini-skirts driving zippy little mini-cars, of the young Michael Caine being happily promiscuous as Alfie at the cinema, of Ready, Steady, Go starting the weekend on television, and of British bands dominating the world of popular music.
And then, to top everything, there was England winning the World Cup. Those who weren’t there must think that the Sixties was one long party. But I have to tell you, I was there, and it wasn’t all quite like that.
Amidst the excitement there were some pretty bleak years, too, most notably 1962, when, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I went to sleep one night wondering whether I would be vapourised by a Soviet nuclear missile while I slept. It could have happened.
But one year, one glorious year, did live up to the legend. It was 1966, and it began just half a century ago today, and, unbelievably to me, it is now distant enough to be considered a part of history. To be young then, and to be lucky enough to be living in the UK, was, in words borrowed from William Wordsworth, ‘very heaven’.
Wordsworth had been poetically musing on the peaceful early days of the French Revolution in 1789, but here in Britain we saw in 1966 a home-grown mini-revolution happily smashing through all kinds of traditional and even technological barricades. Youth culture, free artistic expression and innovation were being given their heads.
By 1966 World War II had been over for twenty years, and young people who had little or no memory of the Blitz, who had grown up on free education, the NHS, almost full employment and the abolition of National Service were now in their teens and twenties.
We were, I still believe, the luckiest generation ever, as we rejoiced in our millions on July 30, 1966 after Geoff Hurst made it 4-2 to England against West Germany. And, as captain Bobby Moore was handed the Jules Rimet trophy, it felt as though we truly were on top of the world – and not just in football. As the Kinks sang that summer, it really was a Sunny Afternoon.
I’d like to be able to say that I was smack bang in the midst of all the Sixties excitement, out clubbing every night with the new young meteors of pop stars, artists and actors. But in fact I was watching enviously from the wings in Liverpool, as I learnt my trade in journalism as a lowly graduate trainee.
Liverpool may have been considered the grooviest city in the world then, but by 1966 the Beatles had fled to London. Just my luck to have missed all the fun, I would regret, as I drove my little red MG Midget into the city centre, Radio Caroline blasting from the car radio.
In retrospect I was more fortunate than I realised. Some of the World Cup group matches took place in Liverpool that summer, and to be in that football mad city at such a time was akin to being baptised at a revivalist meeting. I’ve been a Liverpool FC fan ever since.
Perhaps to be working on a newspaper made me doubly aware, too, as week by week the news told of new opportunities for the go ahead, like the oil which was then being regularly discovered under the North Sea. Optimism shone around, in technology as much as anything else.
There was, for instance, a new British invention called the hovercraft, which in April 1966 began carrying passengers on a cushion of air, rather like a noisy magic carpet, across the English Channel.
Then, lo and behold, a few weeks later a Hawker Harrier plane demonstrated the seemingly impossible at the Farnborough Air Show by taking off vertically, as though it was ascending miraculously into heaven. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s vaunted, and sometimes mocked, promise about our future being built on the ‘white heat of technology’ had just grown wings with the ‘Jump Jet’.
After having grown up cowed by the glamour of rich Americans, with their films and rock and roll, young people suddenly felt a genuine surge of pride in being British – not because we had an empire, because we scarcely did any more, but because of what some of our generation was creating. We were, for instance, leaving the Americans standing at what they had always done best – popular music.
The year had begun with the Beatles’ best LP Rubber Soul – their best, for my money – at the top of the charts. But just seven months later, less than a week after England’s footballers’ great day at Wembley, they had a new album in the shops – the ground-breaking Revolver, which included my all-time favourite, Eleanor Rigby.
Who other than Lennon and McCartney could have written a song about an old lady ‘who dies and is buried along with her name’, and a lonely priest ‘darning his socks in the night’? And who else could have got it to number one, along with its children’s favourite flipside Yellow Submarine?
Eleanor Rigby was British popular music at its very best. But the charts then were replete with classic records which have somehow turned into eternal hits. There was Tom Jones with Green, Green Grass Of Home, the Troggs with Wild Thing and Dusty Springfield’s You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me.
And, before anybody writes to me, I do know we had the Mamas and the Papas’ Monday Monday and the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows that year, too. They were pretty wonderful, as well. The British invasion of the US was making American musicians pull their socks up, which was probably why Bob Dylan decided to tour with a rock and roll band for the first time that year.
It was a brave move for Bobby, earning him the sobriquet of ‘Judas’ among the acoustic folkie crowd who thought he’d sold out, when, at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on May 17, he strapped on a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. It’s difficult to believe, but these things seemed to matter then.
Part of the Sixties legend has, of course, always been Carnaby Street and the fashion industry. But London’s place then as the young fashion capital of the world didn’t happen by chance.
Free thinking attitudes and the teaching of fashion and photography at colleges of art around the country had laid the foundations that would put Twiggy, ‘The Face Of 1966’, on the covers of millions of magazines. She was voted ‘The Woman Of The Year’ as well that December, and she was still only seventeen.
Meanwhile John Lennon was laying the seeds for all kinds of trouble when he suggested to journalist Maureen Cleave that ‘the Beatles are bigger than Jesus now’. When the comment appeared in the Daily Mail’s sister paper, the London Evening Standard, no-one objected particularly. But later in the year when the article was reprinted in an American fan magazine it led to death threats and the burning of Beatles records in the US Bible Belt.
Lennon hadn’t meant to imply that the Beatles were ‘better than Jesus’, he would later apologise, adding that he had simply been observing (and exaggerating, as was his wont) in a jaundiced way the craziness that was Beatlemania. But by then Beatles’ records had already been torched.
1966 had begun with a song high in the charts called England Swings (‘like a pendulum do) by American country singer Roger Miller. Its rhyming was dire, but Miller was on to something, and, three months later, Time magazine took up his theme and did a famous cover story on ‘Swinging London’.
With that piece, London’s Sixties’ image, and, by extension, that of the rest of the country, was captured for international posterity. Simultaneously Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni was attempting to put the era on to film in Blow Up, starring David Hemmings as a groovy young photographer about town. Vanessa Redgrave was in it, too. She bared her chest, while Jane Birkin showed the rest – which was a first for anyone in a British film.
Attitudes to sex and nudity were changing, but all those stories about the Sixties being all ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’ were pretty wide of the mark as far as the mass of young people went.
The Pill had only gone on sale in the UK five years earlier and could still only be acquired by way of a prescription from an often cross-questioning, suspicious doctor. It sometimes took a very brave young single woman to ask for one. While homosexual acts were still a criminal offence.
As for drugs, although amphetamines had been around the clubs for years, cannabis was only just becoming widely available. Mercifully the curse of LSD hadn’t yet reached these shores.
What was leaving these shores, were the fruits of a briefly buoyant period in the British film industry, with Georgie Girl, which was based on a Margaret Forster novel, making a star of Vanessa’s little sister Lynn Redgrave, as well as being the basis for a spin-off hit by the Seekers.
Then there was Robert Bolt’s play about Thomas More, A Man For All Seasons, which, when filmed that year, walked off with six Oscars at the Academy Awards. As Hilary Mantel would later find, you can hardly go wrong with anything about the Tudors, Henry V111 and beheadings.
Equally popular, but less gruesome, was Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor viciously scrapping it out through the booze in Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf. But far cosier and for family audiences was Born Free, in which Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers shared the bill with some unusually friendly lions on the grasslands of Africa.
Ahead of the game, so to speak, in the nascent eco movement, as well as providing a hit song for Matt Monro, Born Free also accidentally proved great publicity for another British first that year.
That was ‘The Lions of Longleat’, launched when the Marquess of Bath, in conjunction with Jimmy Chipperfield of Chipperfield Circus, turned some of the estate around his Elizabethan stately home in Wiltshire into the world’s first drive-through safari park outside Africa.
Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, by way of our local cinemas, Raquel Welsh was provoking all kinds of animal instincts when she appeared in the highly successful, but hardly cerebral, One Million Years BC wearing what looked rather like a bikini made of bear skins. And Clint Eastwood had the biggest hit of the year when he engaged in industrial scale killings in the spaghetti Western The Good The Bad And The Ugly – a habit, his recent film as director, American Sniper, would suggest he still enjoys.
Eastwood had first won his fame in television’s Rawhide, but, though movies would remain the preferred medium of choice for film makers, there was by 1966 a new muscle in British television. No character illustrated this more memorably than Alf Garnett, when he appeared in the first episode of the Till Death Us Do Part in the June.
Warren Mitchell’s comic performance as the wife-bullying, bigoted, racist, ignorant Cockney would win him and the show many prizes, but you have to wonder how many of writer Johnny Speight’s spikier lines on race would be allowable today in our politically correct times.
By far the most important television programme that year was Cathy Come Home, made by the young team of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett, a study of a young mother who falls through the cracks of the welfare system and has her children taken into care.
Another prize winning programme, it made hundreds of newspaper headlines and generated questions in the House Of Commons as it pointed fingers at the inadequacies of the social services. It must have made uncomfortable viewing for the Labour Party which had just won a large majority at the General Election.
This was television doing its job superlatively, as it then did in October when a slag heap of slurry and slag from a pit slid down a mountain and buried a village school at Aberfan in South Wales. One hundred and sixteen schoolchildren, along with twenty eight adults, died that morning, all buried alive under a man-made mountain.
Seeing on our twelve inch monochrome television the inky wet slag, like black lava from a volcano, still seeping through the little village printed a lifelong picture on to my mind. This was 1966. How could such a tragedy occur in what we now considered our new, shiny, modern, Sixties Britain?
There are now no deep pits in the United Kingdom, and the slag heaps have largely been flattened or planted with trees and shrubs to make them stable. But the pain of that day will endure fifty years on in that little town.
Yes, as well as the fun, there were appalling events in 1966, as there are every year, and we remember those, too. The famine in Biafra, the ongoing Vietnam War – to which Harold Wilson refused to commit British troops despite US President Lyndon Johnson’s entreaties.
But human nature is generated by the survival instinct, by healing and by hope, and the belief that we can learn from our mistakes and disasters. As the years fly past we mainly recall the sunny days of our lives, and that, I suspect is how most of us who were around then will remember 1966.
We laugh when reminded of how in 1966 Chi Chi, the female giant panda in London Zoo, was flown to Moscow for what turned out to be a rather disappointing one night stand with An An, an unamorous Russian male panda. We smile and reflect on how our spending has changed since the introduction of Barclaycard, Britain’s first credit card, that year; and we think fondly of how a good night out in 1966 was steak and chips and a schooner of sherry at a Berni Inn.
One schooner would have been enough for me. I couldn’t have afforded more. Besides since January, police forces around the country had started to be issued with a fiendish new device called a breathalyser.
Looking back can we say that 1966 was an important year of change? In some places, yes, and not necessarily for the better. In China, Chairman Mao announced his disastrous Cultural Revolution, in the Soviet Union the Russian bear Leonid Brezhnev emerged as top man, and in Rhodesia Iain Smith took his country out of the Commonwealth when negotiations with the British Government for majority rule finally broke down.
But in Britain the most interesting activity was behind the headlines, as new race relations laws and the homosexual reform act were being prepared, and we wondered, with little enthusiasm for or against, whether President de Gaulle would ever let Britain join the Common Market.
It was said in America that after the war Britain lost an empire and failed to find a new role for itself. But that wasn’t how it felt to be young in 1966. We only looked forward then in that pivotal mid-Sixties year, never back.
Everything seemed possible in the new meritocratic Britain in which the class barriers were, albeit, perhaps briefly, tumbling. Optimism blossomed on the trees. Perhaps some of it opwas misplaced, and, as we now know, there would be disappointments.
But my memories of 1966 are of a year that seemed as young and cheekily ambitious as I was, and, incidentally, a year that was made perfect for me when Plum, my girl friend, and I were married one happy Spring day.
