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On the night of 18 July 1969, a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne drowned after a car driven by Senator Edward Kennedy plunged into a tidal channel. Dominic Sandbrook details the tragedy, Kennedy's actions and the ensuing scandal that engulfed the Kennedy family, and came to be known as the Chappaquiddick incident…
In the summer of 1969, Edward Kennedy was riding high. Tall, handsome and athletic, the 37-year-old senator from Massachusetts was the last great hope of the Kennedy family. His brother Jack had fallen to an assassin’s bullet in 1963, and Robert had been shot while campaigning for the presidency in 1968. The newspapers talked of a ‘Kennedy curse’. But when Ted Kennedy’s fellow Democrats picked him as the youngest ever Senate Majority Whip in January 1969, his political destiny seemed certain. As the future Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, he would surely recapture the White House for the Kennedy family. What happened at Chappaquiddick on 18 July 1969? In July 1969, Kennedy took part in a regatta off Martha’s Vineyard, a summer playground for New England’s elite. On the evening of the 18th, the senator took the ferry to the neighbouring island of Chappaquiddick. There his staff had arranged a party to thank the six ‘boiler room girls’ who had worked on Robert’s ill-fated presidential campaign the previous summer. It was a fine evening, and the drink flowed merrily. At some point between 11 and midnight, Kennedy slipped away, taking one of the women, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, with him. Later he said that he was driving her to her hotel – though she left her handbag and room key behind. About an hour later, a policeman saw a car streaking along an unpaved dirt road. It was Kennedy and Kopechne. Lost in the darkness, Kennedy turned down an unpaved dirt road, and at the end his car slipped off the road and plunged into a deep tidal channel. It takes little imagination to picture the scene: the car falling and turning on its head; the water roaring in; the panic of the two passengers, pounding at the windows. “I remember thinking as the cold water rushed in around my head that I was for certain drowning,” Kennedy said later. “Then water entered my lungs and I actually felt the sensation of drowning. But somehow I struggled to the surface alive.” Mary Jo Kopechne, however, was still down there, trapped, possibly drowning. Kennedy shouted her name and dived fruitlessly into the water. Then he walked back to the party, passing several houses on the way. Back at the party, he told his cousin and an old friend what had happened, but nobody else. They went back to the scene, and the men took turns diving to look for Kopechne. It was no good. Kennedy was now sobbing and barely coherent. His friends told him to go back to Martha’s Vineyard and report the accident to the police. Conspiracy: A HistoryExtra podcast series Member exclusive | Who killed JFK? Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually write his plays? Were the pyramids built by aliens? Expert historians offer their perspectives on history's biggest conspiracy theories. Listen to all episodes now What happened next was, by any standards, peculiar. Still in a terrible state, Kennedy swam the narrow channel to Martha’s Vineyard and, streaming with water, stumbled up to his hotel. Instead of calling the police, however, he went up to his room and changed his clothes. By his own account, he was paralysed by shock: “I almost tossed and turned and walked around that room… I had not given up hope all night long that, by some miracle, Mary Jo would have escaped from the car.” But the hotel staff later reported that at around three in the morning, Kennedy, now wearing a smart jacket and slacks, complained about the noise from a nearby party. A few hours later, having risen early for breakfast, he was seen chatting with his fellow regatta competitors. He seemed in a “jovial” mood. It was not until mid-morning that Kennedy rang the police. By now fishermen had spotted the car, and divers had already recovered Kopechne’s dead body. What happened to Edward Kennedy after Chappaquiddick? The result was a media furore. After pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, Kennedy was given a suspended two-month prison sentence. Read more | The lost Kennedy: the tragic life of JFK’s sister Rosemary His presidential hopes were destroyed, but he saved his political career by giving an emotional television address. He was, he said, the victim of an “awful curse”. He mentioned Mary Jo Kopechne’s name five times. In the following decades, Edward Kennedy became perhaps the most admired senator in the country and a tireless champion for liberal causes. When he died in 2009, President Obama gave the eulogy. There were no such eulogies for Mary Jo Kopechne. The diver who found her stated that she probably survived in an air pocket for at least two hours. Had Kennedy called the police immediately after the accident, she might still be alive today. This article was first published in the July 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
When was the first international rugby match, and who played in it?
Scotland and England have long been rivals on the rugby pitch and now compete annually for the Calcutta Cup. But did you know that the two teams first faced one another in the world's first rugby international match? Dominic Sandbrook considers the occasion on 27 March 1871
To most of the people of Edinburgh, 27 March 1871 was nothing special. As they streamed to work across the city’s bridges, trudging to their workshops and factories in the fine spring air, it seemed just another Monday, heralding the start of another week of toil. Yet for local residents interested in the new sports that were taking root in Britain’s industrial cities, it would be a day to remember. In that morning’s edition of The Scotsman, an advertisement proclaimed that Raeburn Place, the home ground of the Academical Cricket Club, would be hosting an unprecedented sporting encounter, with entrance costing a shilling a head. At three o’clock, 40 young men from England and Scotland were due to contest the world’s first international rugby match. When did the first international rugby fixtures begin? There had long been talk of arranging international fixtures. The previous year, an English side had played a team of Scottish exiles at the Oval in London, although they had been playing under the Association (‘soccer’) rules, which were not very popular in Scotland. The football world was still dominated by bickering between the champions of different codes, and in January 1871 representatives from 21 English clubs had met in a Regent Street restaurant to try to standardise rugby regulations and eliminate the more violent excesses. Read more | Rugby warriors: the rugby-playing heroes of the First and Second World War Their neighbours, however, were determined not to be left behind, and a group of Scottish clubs promptly sent an invitation to London. “With a view of really testing what Scotland can do against an English team,” they wrote, “we, as representing the football interests of Scotland, hereby challenge any team selected from the whole of England, to play us a match, 20-a-side, Rugby rules, either in Edinburgh or Glasgow.” As though determined to confirm suspicions of English insularity, the newly formed Rugby Football Union did nothing about it. But one of London’s oldest clubs, Blackheath, picked up the gauntlet – and the match was on. Who played in the first rugby international? To modern eyes, the world’s first rugby international, played by Scotland and England, looks a slightly strange occasion. When the match kicked off, some 4,000 people were packed into Raeburn Place – tiny by today’s standards, of course, but an extraordinary number by the standards of the day. And the teams’ pre-match preparations were a far cry from the meticulous routines of their modern equivalents. The English players had travelled up the previous night, sleeping on bare boards in a third-class carriage, having paid for their tickets themselves. As for the match itself, rugby in the 1870s would look almost unrecognisable to a modern fan. Scoring a try counted for nothing; it merely allowed the scorers to take a kick at goal. Penalties, meanwhile, were unknown, since no gentleman would ever cheat. And given the persistent bickering over the laws, it is a safe bet that few of the 4,000 spectators would have been entirely clear about the rules. Still, the next day’s Glasgow Herald told its readers that a fine time had been had by all. “The competitors,” it explained, “were dressed in appropriate costume, the English wearing a white jersey, ornamented by a red rose, and the Scotch a brown jersey, with a thistle… The difference between the two teams was very marked, the English being of a much heavier and stronger build compared to their opponents.” However, to the home fans’ delight, the English failed to score during the first 50 minutes, and after the teams had changed ends the Scots began to dominate. As might have been predicted, confusion about the rules flared up again, with the English players bitterly complaining about a Scottish try. Some accounts suggest that the Scots had barged their way over the line, others that a player had fumbled the ball, which was a foul in England but not in Scotland. Either way, the fact is that the game ended with Scotland triumphant, having scored one goal and two tries to England’s solitary try. Afterwards, the ball was exhibited in a shop window in Stockbridge, a symbol of Caledonian pride at a time when the newspapers were debating the prospects for Scottish home rule. Who won the first international rugby match? Yet, in a preview of controversies to come, one of the match umpires, a local headmaster, had not even seen the winning score. Dr HH Almond’s view had been obstructed by the crush on the line, but he had decided to give the verdict to Scotland anyway. “When an umpire is in doubt, I think he is justified in deciding against the side which makes the most noise,” he said later. “They are probably in the wrong.” This article was first published in the March 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech: Britain and race in the mid 20th-century
When the SS Empire Windrush docked in Britain in 1948, it ushered in a new era of immigration. Two decades later, Enoch Powell delivered his Rivers of Blood speech warning of the threat that immigrants posed. Writing for BBC History Magazine in 2008, Dominic Sandbrook considered how race relations developed in the 20 years between the two events
Please note that this article quotes instances of highly offensive racial language When Enoch Powell stood up at lunchtime on Saturday 20 April 1968, his audience of local Conservative activists at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham could hardly have known that they were about to hear the most inflammatory and divisive speech by a British politician in their lifetimes. Already intensely controversial for his views on economics and immigration, the Wolverhampton MP was the darling of the Tory activists, a brooding, saturnine intellectual whose contempt for his Shadow Cabinet colleagues was legendary. Now he had decided to break with them completely. His speech, he had told a friend a day or two earlier, would “fizz like a rocket, but whereas all rockets fall to earth, this one will stay up”. From the outset, his eyes burning above his clipped moustache, Powell was in typically uncompromising form. He recounted a meeting with a working-class constituent who talked of plans to emigrate because “in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. “I can already hear the chorus of execration,” Powell said sarcastically; but he claimed the man had a point. In Wolverhampton alone, “20 or 30 additional immigrant children” were arriving every week. The result, he predicted, would be disaster. “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad,” he said. “We must be mad, literally mad… to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants… It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” Powell then read out a letter from one correspondent describing an alleged incident in Wolverhampton, where an elderly lady had apparently become the only white resident left in her street. “She finds excreta pushed through her letter box,” the letter explained. “When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinned piccaninnies… ‘Racialist’, they chant”. Similar scenes, Powell predicted, would soon be common across the country. And if action were not taken, Britain would face the same race riots that had blazed across the United States of America during the last few years. “Like the Roman,” he concluded grimly, “I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’”. Even in 1968, the so-called Rivers of Blood speech was extraordinarily controversial. Powell himself was summarily sacked from the Tory front bench, never to return; in liberal circles, he became a pariah. Yet few people now care to remember that the speech made him an enormous folk hero, the tribune of Britain’s silent white majority. Hundreds of dockers marched on Westminster to show their support, workers in Wolverhampton and the Black Country walked out to demand his reinstatement, and opinion polls consistently put support for Powell at more than 70 per cent. Within two weeks of the speech, Powell had been sent more than 43,000 letters, almost all of them praising him, and for years afterwards he was easily the most admired politician in the country. What was the reaction to Enoch Powell's 1968 'Rivers of Blood' speech? As we listened to his relentless words… I knew he had taken the lid off Pandora’s box and that race relations in Britain would never be the same again… I believe he has helped to make a race war, not only in Britain but perhaps in the world, inevitable. Barbara Castle’s diary, 21 April 1968 Most people in the country will agree with him… We can take no more coloured people. To do so, as Mr Powell says, is madness. News of the World, 21 April 1968 I dismissed Mr Powell because I believed his speech was inflammatory and liable to damage race relations. I am determined to do everything I can to prevent racial problems developing into civil strife… I don’t believe the great majority of the British people share Mr Powell’s way of putting his views in his speech. Edward Heath, 22 April 1968 Congratulations from my Mother, myself, and many friends on your speech last Saturday. We admire you for speaking up for us all… We know people cannot help the colour of their skin, but they can change their uncivilised way of life by conforming more to ours. Anonymous letter to Powell, 23 April 1968 His views might seem abhorrent to modern readers. And yet there is little doubt that, at the time, he spoke for the vast majority of the British public. One of the ironies of the Rivers of Blood controversy was that it overshadowed the 20th anniversary of that supremely iconic moment in the history of immigration to Britain, the voyage of the SS Empire Windrush from Kingston, Jamaica to Tilbury, where its 492 passengers disembarked on 22 June 1948. Each had paid £28 10s for the chance to escape the poverty and limited horizons of the West Indies, and to build a new life in the imperial mother country. Read more | Bound for Britain: your guide to the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush Hints of the hostility to come Contemporary press reports treated the newcomers as a diverting oddity, not a threat: the Express described trilby-hatted Jamaicans clapping and cheering on the dock before sitting down and tucking into roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and spotted dick. Yet not everybody welcomed the newcomers to Britain’s shores, and even in 1948 there were hints of the anxiety, hostility and prejudice that would lead to Enoch Powell’s speech two decades later. As the Windrush approached, some civil servants had talked of moving its passengers on to Kenya, while a group of Labour back-benchers even wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee complaining that “an influx of coloured people” would “cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned”. Attlee ignored them; like many politicians of the day, he was attached to the ideals of imperial brotherhood. All Britain’s subjects, he wrote, should be “freely admissible to the United Kingdom”. But it was not a view that found much favour with the general public, and by the late 1950s, when West Indians were arriving in Britain at the rate of around 50,000 a year, the extent of public hostility was becoming ever more apparent. Was Britain a racist country in the 20 years between the Windrush’s arrival and Powell’s speech? The answer is rather more complicated than a simple yes or no. Polls found that most Britons disapproved of overt colour prejudice, while as late as 1956, two out of three still supported the principle of unrestricted Commonwealth immigration. Yet the unspoken prejudices that had underpinned the British Empire died hard. Children grew up with stories of imperial derring-do against brutal savages; even a progressive politician like the Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton could refer to the colonies as “diseased nigger communities”. Many hotels, restaurants, dance halls and landlords operated a colour bar; indeed, as more immigrants arrived, the colour bar often became more severe. In the mid-1950s, more than eight out of ten London landladies said they would refuse to house students who were “very dark Africans or West Indians”, while a survey in Birmingham found just 15 landladies out of a thousand who would let rooms to non-white families. “No Coloureds”, the signs used to read, a sentiment with which millions of people evidently agreed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/Immigrants-GettyImages-3355300-WL-2a2a085.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Men who had made the journey to Britain aboard the Windrush. Contemporary press reports treated them as a diverting oddity rather than a threat. (Photo by Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Men who had made the journey to Britain aboard the Windrush" /> Generalising about the immigrant experience is of course extremely difficult. After all, by 1961 the total black and Asian population had risen to 337,000, and ten years later, despite various attempts to curtail it, the immigrant population hit 650,000. Some people clearly thrived in their new homeland, making new friends and progressing rapidly up the career ladder. But they were probably the exceptions. Implicit colour bars in many walks of life, from British Railways platforms to Bristol buses, meant that highly qualified immigrants had to settle for ill-paid, backbreaking jobs: one Pakistani customs inspector, for example, worked as a railways cleaner. “The jobs we got were always the worst, even if we were educated people who could read and write much better than the people who were in charge,” he later remembered. “They knew I had been an inspector of Customs, but that didn’t matter.” Discrimination at work or in housing was bad enough. What was worse, however, was the growing undercurrent of racist violence that finally spilled over in the Nottingham and West London riots of August 1958, when knife-wielding white teenagers, bored in the summer heat, went “nigger hunting” in the dilapidated streets where immigrants had settled. On the worst night of the trouble, some 700 people – among them dozens of women and children – rampaged through the streets of Notting Hill, chanting “Kill the niggers!” One black student, cornered by pursuers, took refuge in the doorway of a greengrocer’s shop; only the intervention of the grocer’s wife saved him from what may have been a savage beating. Read more | The great British civil rights scandal: the Bristol bus boycott Contemporary observers recognised that the fighting was a shocking illustration of the prejudices that bubbled under the apparent civility of British society in the 1950s. In a front page cartoon in the Daily Mirror a few days later, Adolf Hitler’s ghost addresses a “racialist thug” in Teddy Boy regalia. “Go on boy,” the late Führer is saying. “I may have lost that war but my ideas seem to be winning.” After Notting Hill, “racialism” disappeared from the headlines. But it did not disappear from the streets, or from the hearts and minds of millions of people. And while the prejudices of the 1950s can be explained as a hangover from the days of imperial superiority, or as a historically common reaction to people who seemed “different”, in the years that followed racism fed on the alienation of working-class Britons who felt betrayed by Harold Wilson’s government and were horrified by the nation’s apparent decline into economic penury. Indeed, as the 1960s wore on, and even though immigrants were arriving at a slower rate, the politics of race became more intense. And nowhere was this more apparent than in Enoch Powell’s political heartland, the West Midlands. Timeline: From Windrush to Rivers of Blood 22 June 1948 To a mixture of bemusement and hostility, the SS Empire Windrush docks at Tilbury, carrying 492 West Indian passengers who have come to Britain in search of a new life. 23 August – 5 September 1958 Race riots break out in St Ann’s, Nottingham, and Notting Hill, West London, as gangs of white teenagers roam the streets attacking immigrant families. 17 May 1959 Kelso Cochrane, a carpenter from Antigua, is stabbed to death by white youths in Notting Hill in Britain’s first high-profile race-motivated murder. The police discount his colour as a factor, and his killers are never convicted. 18 April 1962 The Macmillan government passes the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which scraps the principle of free admission for all British subjects and introduces strict controls on immigration from the former colonies. 15 October 1964 Peter Griffiths wins the Smethwick parliamentary seat beating Labour’s Patrick Gordon Walker. Posters and stickers carrying racist slogans were used during the election campaign. 22 July 1965 The BBC broadcast the pilot of the sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, introducing millions of viewers to the racist opinions of the East Ender Alf Garnett. 20 April 1968 Enoch Powell delivers his controversial Rivers of Blood speech against immigration at a Conservative meeting in the Midland Hotel, Birmingham, and is summarily sacked from the Shadow Cabinet. 23 April 1968 Hundreds of dockers march on the Houses of Parliament with placards reading “Don’t Knock Enoch”. The protesters force their way into the building to harangue government ministers. Tough times for scapegoats The West Midlands became associated with the politics of racism for two reasons. The area had attracted a disproportionate share of black and Asian immigrants in the mid-1950s, when its engineering and manufacturing firms were booming. Ten years later when the economic pendulum had swung against Britain’s exporters, the firms of the West Midlands were particularly hard hit. And in the grimy, derelict industrial towns of the Black Country, the immigrant communities – who had moved into the cheapest and therefore least salubrious parts of town – made perfect scapegoats. “Vote Labour for more nigger-type neighbours” read campaign stickers in the parliamentary election in Smethwick in 1964. The Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths, a fierce critic of immigration, won the seat, beating Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman Patrick Gordon Walker in one of the century’s most shocking electoral upsets. And although the Smethwick campaign was a rare episode of openly racist electioneering, it exposed the seething, unsettling resentments that lay beneath the froth and bubble of Harold Wilson’s supposedly Swinging Britain. Wilson duly took note; as his minister Dick Crossman recorded in his diary, “immigration [could] be the greatest political vote loser for the Labour Party”. And four years later, the Government passed the controversial Commonwealth Immigrants Act to limit the influx of Asian refugees from persecution in Kenya. It was a “shameful” act, said The Times, while The Spectator called it “one of the most immoral pieces of legislation to have emerged from any British Parliament”. Yet polls showed that it had overwhelming public support. In a massive survey of public attitudes at the end of the 1960s, the magazine New Society found that less than one per cent of the population said they were “pleased” with the “immigration of coloured people” into Britain, while almost 75 per cent agreed that “there are too many coloured immigrants in the country now”. And this was not from some aged, conservative minority: for young and old, rich and poor, northern and southern, Tory and Labour, the results were almost identical. Yet while Britain in 1968 was, in many ways, still Enoch Powell’s country, there is a good case that in the long run the arrival of the Windrush was the more significant moment. Powell was right about one thing. His prediction that immigrants’ descendants would account for six million or so people in 2000 was widely derided at the time as racist scaremongering, but was actually pretty accurate. But he was badly, crucially wrong about the wider question of relations between black and white in modern Britain. His contemporaries were not heaping up their “own funeral pyre”, and neither did the River Thames “foam with much blood” – a tribute, in part, to the good sense of his fellow politicians, most of whom refused to follow his rhetorical example. The promise of the Windrush, however, was amply fulfilled. As immigrants were progressively assimilated into British society in the last decades of the century, and as black England footballers and Asian cricketers took their places in public life alongside black and Asian government ministers, entrepreneurs, writers, actors, models and pop stars the prejudices of the 1950s and 60s gradually disintegrated. Even 40 years after Powell’s speech, of course, racism still survives. But Powell himself would surely be astonished at the success of today’s multi-racial society. And Britain has come a long way from the days when he was the most admired man in the country. You can read more about the events and figures that shaped mid-century Britain in Dominic Sandbrook's White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (2009, Abacus) This article was first published in the March 2008 issue of BBC History Magazine
Richard Nixon's final address: the day the president departed the White House
Historian Dominic Sandbrook recounts the events of 9 August 1974 – the date that Richard Nixon made his final address as president of the United States…
On 9 August 1974, his last morning as president of the United States, Richard Nixon got up at six. Still in his pyjamas, he asked the chef to prepare his favourite meal, corned beef hash and poached eggs. He ate alone in his beloved Lincoln Sitting Room, staring into the fire's dying embers, doubtless pondering the Watergate scandal that had shattered his credibility and made him the first president in history to step down. After breakfast there was a knock on the door: an aide bringing the ceremonial letter. Beneath the words "I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States," Nixon scrawled his name. At nine o’clock, Nixon led his family into the East Room of the White House, where they looked down at the ranks of officials. Even on this last, emotionally searing occasion, everything had been planned with television in mind, and little pieces of tape indicated where each of them should stand. For Nixon’s elder daughter, Tricia, it was a dreadful experience. “Platform ahead,” she recorded in her diary, remembering the scene. “Step up onto platform. Find name marker. Do not trip over wires. Stand on name marker. Reach for Mama’s hand. Hold it. Applause. Daddy is speaking. People are letting tears roll down their cheeks. Must not look. Must not think of it now.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2011/07/GettyImages-517354418-70b5064.png" width="620" height="416" alt="Richard Nixon thrusts both arms into the air in his trademark V-for-victory salute, as he departs on a helicopter" title="In a final bizarre moment of his presidency, Richard Nixon thrusts both arms into the air in his trademark V-for-victory salute. (Image by Getty Images)" /> Exhausted from lack of sleep, shattered after 18 months of pressure, her father stood perspiring beneath the television lights. After everything that he had fought for, after all his hard work to drag himself from the parched earth of California to the elegant staterooms of the White House, he was leaving in disgrace. The shame must have been overwhelming. Nixon stood there before the world, red-eyed, half-smiling. And so often at times of stress, he retreated to the self-pity of the self-made man. “I had come so far from the little house in Yorba Linda to this great house in Washington,” he reflected. “I remember my old man. I think that they would have called him sort of a little man, common man. He didn’t consider himself that way. You know what he was? He was a streetcar motorman first, and then he was a farmer, and then he had a lemon ranch. It was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He sold it before they found oil on it.” On the podcast | Clifford Williamson charts the twists and turns of the conspiracy that sparked a constitutional crisis – and brought down a president For a moment, there was total silence. Then, blinking away tears, Nixon pulled himself back. Putting on his glasses for the first time in public, he read in a trembling voice the moving words written by Theodore Roosevelt after the death of his first wife. At the last line – “And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever” – his voice almost broke with the strain, and there were muffled sobs from the chairs before him. Yet Nixon went on. “The greatness comes not when things go always good for you,” he said. “The greatness comes when you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.” Read more | After Watergate: the fallout of an American scandal On the last words, Nixon’s eyes closed. Then, abruptly, he dragged himself onwards. He had some last advice for his audience. “Always give your best,” he said. “Never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” With the applause ringing in his ears, Nixon led his family downstairs, where Vice President Gerald Ford and his wife Betty were waiting for them. “Good luck, Mr President,” Nixon said coldly. They stepped out onto the South Portico and walked slowly along the red carpet, towards the army helicopter. At the foot of the steps, Nixon paused, and Ford said nervously: “Drop us a line if you get the chance. Let us know how you are doing.” Nixon mounted the steps, and then turned to face the White House. Glaring furiously, he waved his right arm across in a clumsy farewell and then, in the final bizarre moment of his presidency, thrust both arms into the air in his trademark V-for-victory salute. He held the gesture for a moment, his face cracked by an enormous grin. And then the helicopter lifted off the lawn, and he was gone. Read more | Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next This article was first published in the July 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine
Your guide to the miners’ strike of 1984–85
The biggest rail strike in 30 years is causing severe disruption to passengers this week, with the walkout of at least 40,000 members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) union. Here, historian Dominic Sandbrook revisits the longest and most acrimonious industrial dispute in Britain’s modern history: the miners’ strike of 1984–85
The miners’ strike of 1984-85 was the longest and most acrimonious industrial dispute in Britain’s modern history. But it was more than that: to the communities involved, from Scotland and South Wales to Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, it often felt like an undeclared civil war, pitting village against village, family against family – even brother against brother. The origins of the strike lay in the gradual rundown of the British coal industry, with the workforce falling from a peak of more than 1 million between the world wars to barely 200,000 at the start of the 1980s. For decades, Conservative and Labour governments alike had been closing pits and shedding jobs. But as national unemployment mounted, it was obvious more closures would provoke an intense reaction. At the end of 1981, the miners elected a new leader in the hard-left Yorkshireman Arthur Scargill, who made no secret of his eagerness for a confrontation with the government. Scargill predicted – rightly, as it turned out – that in an attempt to stem its heavy financial losses, the National Coal Board was bound to push for further closures. But Scargill denied that there was such a thing as an ‘uneconomic pit’, and argued that every colliery should be kept open, no matter how much it cost. A brief history of strike action Three times Scargill pushed his members to vote for a national strike; three times they voted no. Then, in March 1984, the Coal Board announced plans for a new wave of pit closures. Desperate to preserve their jobs and communities, which often depended entirely on the local pit, the Yorkshire miners walked out, as did their Scottish counterparts. But instead of calling a national strike, Scargill encouraged the regions to follow suit individually. That way, he would still get a strike without having to run the risk of a national ballot. From the start, Scargill was confident of victory. Twice in recent years, in 1972 and 1974, the miners had struck for higher pay, and both times they had won. But this time was different. Listen | Dominic Sandbrook explores the pivotal early years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in Britain, 1979–82 The Thatcher factor First, the miners were divided. In traditionally non-militant Nottinghamshire, many miners resented being strong-armed, as they saw it, into a strike without a ballot. Most Nottinghamshire miners refused to strike, as did smaller groups of miners elsewhere. So right from the start, the dispute was marked by intense bitterness and violent confrontations between striking and working miners. The second difference was that the government was far better prepared in 1984 than it had been 10 years earlier. Since Scargill had been so public about his enthusiasm for confrontation, ministers had been building up coal stocks for years. As a result, the strikers never really came close to causing the kind of coal shortages and power cuts that might have brought victory. What was the Winter of Discontent? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/06/GettyImages-90772777-9a41a92.jpg" width="3696" height="2436" alt="National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM) General Secretary Arthur Scargill during a demonstration against pit closures in Stoke, Staffordshire, March 1984" title="National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM) General Secretary Arthur Scargill during a demonstration against pit closures in Stoke, Staffordshire, March 1984. A supporter can be seen wearing a Margaret Thatcher mask. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)" /> The third difference was the Thatcher factor. Like Scargill, Mrs Thatcher struck a remarkably aggressive, uncompromising tone right from the start. She encouraged the police to crack down on picketing miners and badgered local Chief Constables to block the mobile ‘flying pickets’ which had been so successful in the 1970s. Some commentators worried that she was using the police as a paramilitary wing of the state. But as the dispute went on, she became ever more outspoken, even describing the miners’ leaders as Britain’s “enemy within”. How should history remember Margaret Thatcher? Very quickly, therefore, the strike became a trial of strength between two exceptionally abrasive public figures. In the media, the striking miners, working miners and the police were cast as little armies sweeping backwards and forwards across the countryside. Meanwhile the newspapers played up every skirmish for all it was worth. Although there was clearly violence on both sides, miners’ leaders often complained that the press exaggerated strikers’ violence while ignoring the abuses of the police. In particular, the miners’ supporters were outraged by the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in June 1984, when mounted policemen charged pickets outside a South Yorkshire coking plant – an event that has gone down in political folklore. Even at this early stage, Scargill’s cause was probably doomed. With coal stocks high, the miners divided and public opinion firmly against the strike, he was always facing an uphill struggle. According to a poll by the Opinion Research Corporation for the Evening Standard, published on 31 August 1984, some 94 per cent of the public disapproved of pickets' tactics and, when asked to pick between working and striking miners, 74 per cent sympathised with working miners compared to just 19 per cent with strikers. Read more | The 1888 Matchgirls strike: how a group of East End women changed British labour history But with both sides refusing to compromise, the strike dragged on for almost exactly a year, causing immense hardship to thousands of families, before Scargill reluctantly conceded defeat in March 1985. Although the strike was over, the scars never went away. To this day both sides have their impassioned partisans. Afterwards the pace of closures was accelerated, and many pit villages never recovered. Whatever people thought of the issues at stake, millions were appalled by the scenes of open fighting between pickets and police, which became emblematic of the conflicted, confrontational 1980s. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and television presenter best-known for his books about Britain since the 1950s. The most recent, Who Dares Wins (Allen Lane, 2019), covers the early 1980s, including the first Thatcher administration, the Falklands War, and the New Romantics. You can listen to a podcast interview with Dominic about the early 1980s here
As the Queen celebrates her platinum jubilee, Dominic Sandbrook looks back on how Britain has changed radically during her lifetime
This week sees Queen Elizabeth II make history as the first ever British monarch to celebrate their platinum jubilee. To mark her 70 years on the throne, Rhiannon Davies speaks to Dominic Sandbrook about some of the radical transformations the nation has undergone during her lifetime. Read more from Dominic Sandbrook about how Britain has changed during the reign of Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II: the constant face of a changing Britain
For many, the Queen is a symbol of perpetual, old-fashioned stability. Yet, says Dominic Sandbrook, she has nonetheless been part of one of the most remarkable chapters of social transformation in British life
Shortly before 3am on 21 April 1926, a little girl was born to Prince Albert, Duke of York (the future George VI) and his wife Elizabeth. The new arrival’s exhausted mother had been hoping for a girl, while her father could barely contain his joy. “We always wanted a child,” Albert wrote afterwards, “to make our happiness complete.” Few could have guessed it at the time, but that little girl would become perhaps the most recognisable British face of the century. In many ways, her life could hardly have been more different from the experiences of most ordinary people. Elizabeth II has never shopped at Asda or at Aldi; never spent a week at Butlin’s or at Center Parcs; never filled in a pools coupon or gambled on the Lottery; never worried about her hire-purchase repayments, her mortgage or her pension. Read more | 12 surprising facts about Queen Elizabeth II She has never known the fear of unemployment or the joy of promotion; never felt the anxiety of the first week at university or the nerves of a first job interview; never been on a demonstration, danced at a rock festival or watched a football match in a pub. She does, however, watch television; her favourite shows down the years reportedly include Dad’s Army, Midsomer Murders and, perhaps a little implausibly, The Bill. In this, at least, she is not so different from millions of her fellow Britons. As Elizabeth II, she has become the living symbol of our nation, from giggling princess to radiant young queen, from anxious mother to beloved grandmother. Indeed, on the surface at least, the Queen has become the incarnation of the eternal, unchanging verities of selflessness, self-discipline and responsibility. To many of her people, she represents stability and continuity, the virtues of the tweed overcoat and the battered Land Rover, the appeal of old-fashioned Christian charity and unashamed moral conservatism; the embodiment not just of our royal family, our national history and our collective traditions, but of Britishness itself. Read more | Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip: 8 milestones in their marriage Yet the irony is that few monarchs have presided over an age of such dramatic and turbulent change, from the disappearance of the British empire and the decline of British Christianity to the rise of divorce and digital technology. Indeed, the very fact of change is surely a compelling reason why her deliberately old-fashioned image remains so overwhelmingly popular. For to look back across the Queen’s nine decades is to gaze across a social and cultural landscape that, superficially at least, has changed utterly. Our clothes, our food, our pleasures, our values, even our holidays and our hobbies: all these things tell a story of astonishing transformation. When Elizabeth was born in April 1926, Britain was only weeks away from the outbreak of the General Strike. The scars of the First World War were still raw; with unemployment having soared in the immediate aftermath, disabled servicemen could be seen begging on street corners. The prime minister of the day, Stanley Baldwin, was at heart and in outlook something of a Victorian, a Worcestershire industrialist who had anonymously donated around a fifth of his personal fortune to help repay Britain’s war debts. And against Baldwin’s Conservatives stood a Labour party dominated by trade unionists and manual workers, whose leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was the illegitimate son of a Scottish farm labourer and a housemaid. Read more | Elizabeth II and her prime ministers Yet although it is tempting to play up the Victorianism of Baldwin’s Britain, and the supposed backwardness of the years when little Elizabeth was reportedly “chattering and bombarding the guests with crackers” at Christmas parties, this would, I think, be a mistake. Even in the late 1920s, there were powerful hints of the changes that would dramatically reshape British life and culture during the future Queen’s lifetime. For although the twenties and thirties are often remembered as an age of strikes and dole queues, captured in the memorable images of long lines of men in flat caps and grey overcoats, this was only part of the story. Growing up in a time of change Even as young Elizabeth was playing on her rocking horse, thousands of young women, for example, were cutting their hair shorter, wearing their skirts higher, smoking, drinking and even driving. And in 1934, when Elizabeth was just seven, the writer JB Priestley memorably suggested that for all the appearance of tradition, England was in the throes of tremendous social change. (Unlike many other writers of the day, he really did mean England, rather than Britain. Even so, his remarks apply equally well to Wales and Scotland.) There were, Priestley wrote, three versions of England. One was “Old England, the country of the cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and inns, of parson and squire; guide-book and quaint highways and byways England.” This, of course, is the England that millions of tourists visit every year; the England of Oxford and Cambridge, Bath and the Cotswolds; it is also, in essence, the England that Elizabeth II has come above all to represent. Read more | Why does Britain have a royal family? Priestley’s second England, however, has now almost vanished. This was the England of the urban north and Midlands, “the 19th-century England, the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways; of thousands of rows of little houses all alike, sham Gothic churches, square-faced chapels, Town Halls, Mechanics’ Institutes, mills, foundries, warehouses… mill chimneys, slums, fried-fish shops, public-houses with red blinds, bethels in corrugated iron, good-class draper’s and confectioners’ shops, a cynically devastated countryside, sooty dismal little towns, and still sootier grim fortress-like cities.” You can, of course, still see the remains of this England, though it is surely telling that it has been best preserved in places like the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, where dozens of Victorian buildings, from workshops to confectionary stores, have been painstakingly moved and maintained. In the early 1930s, when Priestley was writing, it was threatened by the experience of the Depression. It enjoyed a last hurrah in the 1950s, when British manufacturers enjoyed a brief but illusory Indian summer as their foreign competitors struggled to rebuild from the devastation of the Second World War. But although poverty and deprivation have never gone away, the world of the industrial working class, the world of Methodist chapels and street corner pubs, has largely disappeared. Read more | The 1951 Festival of Britain: banishing the gloom of postwar Britain It was Priestley’s third England, though, that held the key to the immense social changes that broke like a tidal wave over the United Kingdom during Elizabeth II’s lifetime. This was what he called the “new postwar England… the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons”. And although some of this seems quaint today – the greyhound tracks and cigarette coupons, for example – there is also much that seems prescient and familiar. I think Priestley’s third England – a society already being transformed by leisure, affluence and consumerism, especially in those parts of the south and Midlands that had been spared the ravages of the Depression – offered a preview of the changes that would sweep over the nation during the 1950s and 1960s. These changes were delayed, of course, by the onset of the Second World War (in which the young Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as No 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor) and by the privations of postwar austerity. But, given the transformation of the economy, the rise of consumerism and the expansion of education, they were surely inevitable. Elizabeth takes the throne Elizabeth became Queen in 1952, in an age of smog and fog, thick greatcoats, stodgy food and heavy coins; the age of Stanley Matthews and Billy Wright, Vera Lynn and Arthur Askey. Class consciousness hung heavy in the air, yet most people felt tightly connected by their common culture. By contemporary standards, it looks an almost antediluvian world. More than one in four people had outside toilets; fridges and washing machines were expensive luxuries; televisions were almost unknown; and there were three million cars on the roads, compared with more than 35 million today. Read more | Netflix’s The Crown: the real history behind the royal drama Yet this was also a world in flux. After years of greyness, deprivation and austerity, Britain’s new Queen seemed to symbolise a better, brighter future. Commentators talked of a New Elizabethan Age, an age of technological innovation and cultural renaissance. On Cor­on­ation Day, 2 June 1953, around 3 million people lined the streets of London, cheering and waving their flags despite the pouring rain. Even more significantly – especially for the long-term future of the monarchy – the sales of new television sets doubled in the month before the coronation. On the big day itself, some 20 million people watched several hours of the BBC’s reverential black and white coverage. Indeed, to most ordinary viewers, it was a national spectacle like no other. Read more | In pictures: Queen Elizabeth II on tour To Elizabeth herself, now a serious, reserved young mother, the coronation was above all a deeply personal, even spiritual experience. Yet it was also awash with the kind of consumerism that would come to define our national life in the decades that followed. Sales of flags, banners and memorabilia went through the roof and the day even gave the country a new national dish – Coronation Chicken, an Anglo-Indian mixture invented especially for the palace banquet by the food writer Constance Spry and the chef Rosemary Hume. Two years later, as the press pored over the love life of the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret, who had become involved with the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend, came another sign of the new pressures of the mass media and the cult of celebrity, which would only increase as Elizabeth’s reign continued. The magic of monarchy had long resided in its paradoxical combination of remoteness and accessibility. But with the birth of television and the emergence of a less deferential media culture, this would become a harder trick to pull off. Indeed, re-reading those gossip columns from 1955, it is hard not to think of what was coming: the divorces of the Queen’s children, the Sarah Ferguson saga, the death of Diana and the ensuring media furore. Read more | Elizabeth II: the queen who saved the royals In the years that followed, the rhetoric of a New Elizabethan age began to look increasingly hollow. Only three years after the coronation, the fiasco of the Suez Crisis laid bare Britain’s reduced economic and diplomatic position for all to see. By the 10th anniversary of her accession, much of the empire had already evaporated. Pitfalls in the New Elizabethan Age The influx of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Britain’s former colonies transformed the look of our cities, the sound of our music and even the flavours of our foods, but it also exposed an uglier side to our national life, from the young hoodlums who rioted in Notting Hill in 1958 to the skinheads who marched against the Ugandan Asians in 1972. And although the supposedly Swinging Sixties brought rising living standards, new universities and the liberalisation of the laws governing divorce, abortion and homosexuality, they also brought new anxieties about the competitive decline of Britain’s economy and new uncertainties about a post-imperial nation’s place in a changing world. Read more | The Beatles: 8 landmark moments that chart the changing face of sixties Britain The curious thing is that through all this, Elizabeth herself remained remarkably constant. The tapes of her annual Christmas broadcasts show that her accent gently altered over the years, losing a little of the clipped, glacial rigidity of her first broadcasts. In essence, though, she always played the same part, never deviating from her lines, never faltering, never putting so much as a foot out of place. And the truth is that this explains much of her success. In an age where everything else seemed in flux – when the currency was being decimalised, when bombs were going off in Northern Ireland, when factories across the land were closing their doors, when the advent of computer technology was transforming the high street – Elizabeth represented a reassuring fixed point. Everything else had changed. But she, at least, seemed to stay the same. In some ways, the story of Britain during Elizabeth’s lifetime has been one of conspicuous decline. In 1926, the empire was at its height, while the great engine of British manufacturing was still running at full throttle. The empire is now merely a distant and often controversial memory, while Britain has perhaps never been more dependent on its neighbours and its alliances, not just for its energy, but for its military security and economic prosperity. Read more | Buckingham Palace intruder Michael Fagan: what happened and what did he say to the Queen? In other ways, though, life for ordinary people has very clearly improved. Britain in 2016 is a more cosmopolitan, outward-looking country than in 1926, its people benefiting from freedoms and opportunities of which their predecessors could barely dream. Indeed, nothing sums that up better than a social change perfectly symbolised by Elizabeth’s own extraordinary prominence as a symbol of her nation – namely, the transformation in the horizons and expectations of Britain’s women. Today, when millions of women head out to work every day, we can easily forget how different life was in the 1920s. We rarely think of Elizabeth II as a working mother, since her job is not one to which the rest of us can reasonably aspire and her life often seems almost impossibly remote. But that, of course, is exactly what she has been. And, in a funny way, perhaps that makes her a surprisingly appropriate symbol of change after all. This article first appeared in BBC History Magazine's 'The Queen at 90' bookazine
How the Beatles were in tune with 60s Britain
Dominic Sandbrook explains how the Beatles reflected 1960s Britain, from the globalisation of pop culture to a fascination with mysticism
The 1960s was a time of transformation, as the grey of postwar Britain gave way to a technicolour youth culture, with screaming teenage fans, an outpouring of merchandise and a deep obsession with pop music. Dominic Sandbrook speaks to Rhiannon Davies about how the Beatles provided the soundtrack to a rapidly changing society. How to download the HistoryExtra podcast Download as MP3
The Beatles: 8 landmark moments that chart the changing face of sixties Britain
On the release of Get Back, Peter Jackson’s new documentary on the Beatles, Dominic Sandbrook reveals what eight landmark moments in the Fab Four’s career can tell us about the changing face of Britain in the sixties
Listen to this article: The Fab Four rejuvenated Britain's image and, as Dominic Sandbrook reveals in eight landmark moments, defined British society in the sixties… John and Paul’s big bang moment Woolton Church Fete, 6 July 1957 It was a sunny afternoon in the summer of 1957, and all seemed right with the world. Twelve years after the end of the Second World War, Harold Macmillan’s Britain was booming, the economy buoyant, the “affluent society” in full swing. And in the comfortable Liverpool suburb of Woolton, everybody was looking forward to the St Peter’s parish church fete, a highlight of the summer calendar. On the surface, it all seemed entirely unremarkable, a sign of the underlying conservatism of British life in the late 1950s. The band of the Cheshire Yeomanry led a procession through the streets, and floats of Scouts and Guides, Cubs and Brownies, Morris dancers and schoolchildren in fancy dress all followed in their wake. In the field behind the church a makeshift stage had been set up, surrounded by stalls selling home-made cakes and sweets, fruit and vegetables and hardware, and sideshows like bagatelle, hoopla and shilling-in-the-bucket. Here was fifties Britain in miniature: an affluent, booming society, but also an intensely nostalgic, self-consciously traditional one, caught between the consolations of the past and the excitements of the future. It was only from this world, with its blend of old and new, that the Beatles could ever have emerged. And it was here, just after four o’clock, that the 15-year-old Paul McCartney had a meeting that would change his life. A keen musical enthusiast, McCartney had come to the fete hoping to meet some girls, but he had also heard reports of a local skiffle band called the Quarry Men, fronted by a teenager called John Lennon. And as he strolled onto the field, the Quarry Men were already on stage, playing a recent hit by the Del-Vikings. When the band had finished – yielding the stage to a display by the City of Liverpool Police Dogs – the two boys went over to the church hall for a chat. When McCartney did his Gene Vincent and Little Richard impersonations, borrowing a guitar and reeling off lyrics and chord changes from memory, Lennon’s eyes widened with admiration. Two weeks later, he invited McCartney to join the band. And with that, the most celebrated collaboration in pop music history was born. A rough new world for youth culture Hamburg, 17 August 1960 On the evening of 17 August 1960, a battered cream and green Austin van sputtered into the German city of Hamburg. In the back were the five young members of a band called the Beatles – Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best. None had been to Germany before. But they had just agreed a deal to play for three months in a Hamburg nightclub – and not surprisingly, they were feeling nervous. For a young Englishman at the turn of the 1960s, Hamburg could hardly have been more exotic. It was a port city, famed for its club scene, red-light district and rough-edged atmosphere. The newcomers played at the Indra club, a dingy cellar that doubled as a strip joint. Often their audiences consisted only of the local prostitutes and their clients. Yet the Beatles’ Hamburg residency was part of a wider story – a symbol not just of the globalisation of popular culture, and of Britain’s deep links with mainland Europe, but of the expanding horizons that travel, entertainment and the nascent mass-market youth culture brought for so many young people in the early 60s. With Britain’s skiffle market saturated, canny promoters had started bringing bands to the continent to entertain sailors and American soldiers in major West German towns. In Hamburg alone the curious punter might expect to see Dave Lee and the Staggerlees from Cornwall or the Nashville Teens from Weybridge. And it was here that the Beatles became used to dressing up and playing in front of a live crowd. It was in Hamburg, in other words, that they grew up. All hail the darlings of the establishment Royal Variety Performance, 4 November 1963 Despite the headlong economic growth of the day, Britain in the early 60s often seemed an intensely deferential, backward-looking society. Few cultural occasions loomed larger than the annual Royal Variety Performance, and invitations were highly prized. Never, though, had there been bigger crowds than those assembling outside the Prince of Wales Theatre, Leicester Square, on the evening of 4 November 1963. Most were in their teens, and the vast majority were girls. And they had come to see only one act: the Beatles. By this point, the Beatles were already very well known, having broken through to nationwide success at the turn of the year. By the autumn of 1963, ‘She Loves You’ was top of the NME singles chart, ‘Twist and Shout’ was top of the EP chart, and 'Please Please Me' was top of the LP chart. But it was their debut at the Royal Variety Performance that really turned the Beatles into household names. When ITV broadcast the tape of the concert a few days later, almost 26 million people tuned in. “Night of Triumph for Four Young Men,” was the Daily Mail’s verdict. “Yes – the Royal Box was stomping.” The irony is that only a few years earlier, most newspapers had been sworn foes of rock and roll. But now they embraced the Beatles as national heroes. “You have to be a real sour square not to love the nutty, noisy, happy, handsome Beatles,” explained the Mirror. “The Beatles are whacky. They wear their hair like a mop – but it’s WASHED, it’s super clean. So is their fresh young act.” “Yeah! Yeah! USA!” Ed Sullivan Show, 9 February 1964 It’s impossible to overstate the impact of the Beatles’ arrival in New York in February 1964. Before they landed, no British group had had a serious break in the United States, and British popular culture was generally seen as stuffy and old-fashioned. By the time they left, the picture had changed forever. The key moment was their appearance on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show, watched by 73 million people, then the largest audience in American television history. The next day’s papers claimed that the streets of New York were deserted as people huddled in front of their television sets – even the evangelist Billy Graham broke his rule about not watching television on the Sabbath so that he could see what was getting his daughters so excited. In the United States, Beatles merchandise was everywhere. In the aftermath of the group’s triumphant appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, 100,000 Beatles dolls poured into the shops of New York, while various companies produced an estimated 35,000 Beatles wigs a day. And at home, their success was treated as a kind of national vindication after years of retreat. “YEAH! YEAH! USA!” roared a triumphant headline in the Mirror. The Americans quickly adopted the now-famous term already being used in British media: Beatlemania. Almost overnight, Britain’s image had been reborn, from a tired old colonial empire to a modern, youthful, dynamic fashion capital. “If any country is in deficit with us,” said the new Conservative prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, “I have only to say the Beatles are coming.” The New Musical Express went on to agree: “We may be regarded as a second-class power in politics, but at any rate we now lead the world in pop music!” You can watch Get Back by signing up for Disney+ for £7.99 a month or £79.90 a year Creative highs, financial angst Revolver, 5 August 1966 The Beatles’ seventh studio album, Revolver, marked the moment they reached artistic maturity. With its electronic experiments, psychedelic effects and intricate song lyrics, it transcended their previous material and broke new ground in demonstrating what a pop group could achieve. Even at the time, in August 1966, some listeners recognised it as a masterpiece. The jazz musician and critic George Melly wrote that the Beatles had broken “right through the conventions of the very best traditions of popular song”, adding that pop had finally “come of age”. But one of Revolver’s less celebrated songs tells an unexpected story about Britain in the mid-1960s. The band were now enormously, colossally rich – so rich they had left their old lives far behind. Since their breakthrough, the picture had begun to darken for Britain’s economy. Many British industries were increasingly uncompetitive, losing market share to their foreign competitors. Prices were rising; so, almost unnoticed, was unemployment. And for rich men like the Beatles, there was another anxiety: tax. The top income tax rate under Harold Wilson’s Labour government was 90 per cent, which explains why newspapers were already fretting about a “brain drain”, as high earners moved to Australia, South Africa or the United States. Having grown up in a Liverpool council house as the son of a bus driver and a shop assistant, George Harrison had never felt guilty about wanting to do well. Filling in a questionnaire about his ambitions before the Beatles became famous, he had written: “To retire with a lot of money, thank you.” Now he poured his financial anxiety into the song ‘Taxman’, a howl of protest against the Inland Revenue’s demands. When Victorians reigned again Sgt Pepper, 26 May 1967 Britain in the 1960s was a society obsessed with its own past. Now that the British empire had faded into history, John Bull was busy reinventing himself as a joke – a kind of carnival turn – and nothing captured that better than the Beatles’ eighth and most celebrated album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released at the end of May 1967. For many contemporary listeners, Sgt Pepper was an extraordinary, even bewildering experience, with its continuous stream of sound, its studio banter, steam organs and animal noises, its combination of cartoonish psychedelia, circus vaudeville, driving rock music and gentle ballads. Perhaps the most striking thing, though, was the influence of the old-fashioned Victorian music hall, from the jaunty love song ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ to the fairground sound on ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ – a clear nod to the traditions with which the Beatles had grown up in northern England. None of this was an accident. Victoriana was everywhere in the popular culture of the mid-1960s, from the art nouveau fabrics in home-improvement magazines to the colossal popularity of The Forsyte Saga, which was running every week on BBC Two in the first half of 1967. Even fashion, abandoning the space-age look popular a few years earlier, was now turning nostalgic. The current vogue, declared the Daily Sketch that summer, was for “Indian jackets and dresses, kimonos, Victorian dresses, elaborately patterned, beaded and flowing twenties and thirties dresses, bell-bottomed trousers and brocade waistcoats”. What best captured this new aesthetic, though, was Sgt Pepper itself – meaning the physical artefact. Jann Haworth and Peter Blake’s cover shows the Beatles as moustachioed Victorian bandsmen, surrounded by their cultural heroes, from Sir Robert Peel, Aubrey Beardsley and Edgar Allan Poe to Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde and HG Wells – a Who’s Who of eminent Victorians. The magic wand of spiritualism Meeting the Maharishi, 24 August 1967 In August 1967, three of the Beatles, minus Ringo, pushed their way through the crowds into the Park Lane Hilton for a lecture. The speaker was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a self-professed Indian holy man with a grey beard, long robes and garlands of flowers. Having studied transcendental meditation for 13 years in the Himalayas, he already had some 250 worldwide meditation centres and 10,000 British converts. None, however, were as famous as the Beatles. After the Hilton lecture, they were granted a brief audience. “You have created a magic wand in your name,” he told them. “Wave it so that it will move in the proper direction.” In the press, the Beatles’ flirtation with the Maharishi, which included spiritual regeneration retreats in north Wales and the foothills of the Ganges, was a sensation. In bohemian and artistic circles the east had long been seen as glamorous and mysterious. And by 1967 some British students were already embarking on the so-called “hippie trail”, travelling overland through Turkey and Iran towards Afghanistan and India. But it was the Beatles who really turned the fascination with the east into a more mainstream preoccupation. By the end of the 1960s, Buddhism, Hinduism and transcendental meditation had become immensely fashionable. The popularity of the sitar musician Ravi Shankar owed much to his friendship with George Harrison, who had developed a love for Indian music. And in 1971 Shankar and Harrison co-organised the pioneering Concert for Bangladesh – the first major rock concert for a charitable cause. Read more | When Live Aid rocked the world A dream dies as recession beckons Break-up, April 1970 The Beatles phenomenon was born of affluence and optimism, a product of the buoyant economic growth and booming teenage markets of the Macmillan years in the early 1960s. It was fitting, then, that the band broke up at the moment the economic and political skies were darkening, as the heady utopianism of the Swinging Sixties gave way to the anger and anxieties of the following decade. In retrospect, the Beatles were probably doomed as early as 1968, when the four members began to quarrel about musical and business issues. Both Lennon and Harrison were keen to try new individual ventures and by early 1969 the former’s new wife, Yoko Ono, was proving to be a destabilising influence. By that autumn, the band was effectively dead. But it was not until the following April, when Paul McCartney issued a statement that he had no plans to work with the Beatles again, that they formally broke up. Today it’s often said that the dissolution of the Beatles was the moment the sixties ended. Certainly, as the seventies dawned, their sound – daring, confident, youthful, experimental – appeared the product of a bygone era. Within just a few years, economic growth would come grinding to a halt, with the OPEC oil shock pushing the western world into recession. And in Edward Heath’s Britain, public life took on a harsher edge, typified by strikes, inflation, terrorist atrocities and political breakdown. Read more | The death of John Lennon: what happened? So if the Beatles had stayed together, perhaps they would have struggled to find a place in the uneasy world of the 1970s. Theirs was the music of youth and hope, a reminder of a vanished age of utopian idealism. And so, by and large, it remains today. Get Back, Peter Jackson’s three-part series on the making of the Beatles’ album Let it Be, is available on Disney+ now This article first appeared in the Christmas 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine Get Back is available on Disney+. To watch you need a Disney+ account (£79.90 a year and £7.99 a month)
History’s greatest mysteries: Agatha Christie disappears
History's greatest mysteries podcast series
As part of our series on history’s greatest mysteries, Dominic Sandbrook discusses the case of Agatha Christie's disappearance…
In December 1926, crime writer Agatha Christie left her home and vanished without a trace. When she was discovered 11 days later, Christie claimed to have no memory of what had happened. As part of our series on history’s greatest mysteries, Dominic Sandbrook discusses the case that baffled the British public and triggered one of the largest manhunts ever mounted. Browse all episodes in our podcast series on History's Greatest Mysteries