1964 E-Book

Christopher Sandford

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 528

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Step back in time to 1964, a year of cultural upheaval and political transformation. From the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the United States to the global phenomenon of Beatlemania, this was the year that gave us bold fashion, unforgettable music and social change that continues to shape society across the world today. While Britain's new Labour government promised the 'white heat of technology', on the world stage 1964 saw the escalation of the Vietnam War, Nelson Mandela's sentence to life imprisonment and the continued brinkmanship of the global arms race. Brand-new subcultures clashed at Margate beach, where thousands of Mods and Rockers fought over their differing values, while London's Carnaby Street shone vibrantly in the country's capital and women flocked to Mary Quant's iconic designs, empowered by changing social sensibilities and rising hemlines. In this captivating blend of historical events, cultural trends and personal anecdotes, Christopher Sandford tells the full and colourful story of the year that ushered in the modern era.

Leseprobe

1964

For the Rushbrooke family

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham ,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Christopher Sandford, 2024

The right of Christopher Sandford to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 601 1

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologie

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD

HISTORY

Houdini and Conan Doyle

The Final Over

Harold and Jack

The Man Who Would be Sherlock

Union Jack

The Zeebrugge Raid

The Final Innings

The Man Who Conned the World

Midnight in Tehran

MUSIC BIOGRAPHIES

Mick Jagger

Eric Clapton

Kurt Cobain

David Bowie

Sting

Bruce Springsteen

Keith Richards

Paul McCartney

The Rolling Stones

FILM BIOGRAPHIES

Steve McQueen

Roman Polanski

SPORT

The Cornhill Centenary Test

Godfrey Evans

Tom Graveney

Imran Khan

John Murray

Laker and Lock

FICTION

Feasting with Panthers

Arcadian

We Don’t Do Dogs

PLAYS

Comrades

‘We believe we are able to change the things around us. We forget the solution that generally comes to pass: we do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.’

Marcel Proust, The Sweet Cheat Gone

‘Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.’

Mick Jagger

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

I. WINTER

II. SPRING

III. SUMMER

IV. AUTUMN

SOURCES AND CHAPTER NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is yet another lockdown book, at least in part, though I hope the reader won’t notice any conspicuous falling off from the modest standards of the ones written before the sanitary dictatorship clamped down for all time here in the American west, where I mostly live. For structural reasons I’ve divided the story into four main chapters that broadly follow the annual seasons, though with no superhuman effort to keep the compartments watertight; Vietnam might surface in February as well as in November, for instance; the joyous derangement of the Beatles and others cut right across the calendar; and the most brutal crime rarely seems to take a holiday. More importantly, it goes without saying that neither our current political rulers, nor any of the names listed below, can be blamed for the shortcomings of the text. They’re mine alone.

For archive material, input or advice I should thank, professionally: AbeBooks; the Acton Institute; America; Mark Beynon; the British Library; the British Newspaper Library; Companies House; the Cricketer International; Emerald Downs; the FBI, Freedom of Information Division; the General Register Office; Tony Gill; Hansard; Hedgehog Review; The History Press; Barbara Levy; the Library of Congress; Christine McMorris; the Mitchell Library, Glasgow; Mitre House Hotel; Modern Age; The National Archives; Peter Noone; The Oldie; Bill Payne; Plough; Tim Reidy; Renton Public Library; Seattle Central College; The Seattle Times; The Spectator; Surrey History Centre; Sussex CCC; Derek Turner; Vital Records; and Simon Wright.

And personally: Rev. Maynard Atik; the late Sam Banner; Pete Barnes; the late David Blake; Rob Boddie; the Brazen Head; Robert and Hilary Bruce; Don Carson; Monty Dennison; the Dowdall family; Barbara and the late John Dungee; Mike and Roger Fisher; Steve Fossen; Malcolm Galfe; Simon George; James Graham; Steve and Jo Hackett; Duncan Hamilton; the late John Hastings; Alastair Hignell; Charles Hillman; Alex Holmes; Jo Jacobius; Julian James; Robin B. James; Tommy James; Jo Johnson; the late Wilko Johnson; Lincoln Kamell; Terry Lambert; Belinda Lawson; the Lorimer family; Robert Dean Lurie; Les McBride; Linda McBride; the Macris; Lee Mattson; Jim Meyersahm; Jerry Miller; the Morgans; Harry Mount; the Murray family; Greg Nowak; Phillip Oppenheim; Valya Page; Robin and Lucinda Parish; Owen Paterson; Roman Polanski; the Prins family; Matt Purple; Bill Reader; the late Ailsa Rushbrooke; Debbie Saks; the late Sefton Sandford; Peter Scaramanga; Fred and Cindy Smith; the Smith family; Sparks; Jack Surendranath; Nick Tudball; Derek Turner; the late Diana Villar; Lisbeth Vogl; Phil Walker; Wisden Cricket Monthly; Rogena and the late Alan White; Debbie Wild; the Willis Fleming family; and the Zombies.

My deepest thanks, as always, to Karen and Nicholas Sandford.

C.S.

2024

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

See pages 143–158 for illustrations.

1. The Beatles land in New York in February 1964 for the ‘Big Bang’ moment of pop music. The cap just visible behind Paul McCartney’s head belongs to the record producer Phil Spector. It was a symbolic position for Spector, whose own career would also be obscured by those of the new arrivals. (Library of Congress)

2. Ronan O’Rahilly, the young Irish nightclub owner who launched Radio Caroline.

3. The police intervene in one of the clashes between rival gangs of Mods and Rockers that enlivened Margate and other English seaside towns in the chilly spring of 1964. (Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo)

4. The early Rolling Stones; you would have got long odds in 1964 that they would still be in business sixty years later. (Archive PL/Alamy Stock Photo)

5. Princess Margaret gets around.

6. Alec Douglas-Home, Britain’s accidental prime minister for a year, who against the odds nearly won a general election. (Wikimedia Commons/Allan Warren)

7. George Brown visits President Kennedy in the White House, at least proving they once met. (Robert Knudsen/White House Photographs/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

8. Bruce Reynolds (right) and other future Great Train Robbers celebrate a successful job with their wives. (Wikimedia Commons/Karen Hogan)

9. Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland. He had a series of heart attacks, she was fired from a film and between them they lost their dog during the excitement of their whirlwind romance. (Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

10. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton: Hollywood royalty, if in his case at consort level.

11. Stanley Kubrick, who apart from being a revolutionary filmmaker remains one of the few people ever to emigrate from Beverly Hills to suburban Watford.

12. Cassius Clay, at age 22, defied pre-fight predictions to become world heavyweight boxing champion in February 1964. Two days later, Clay let it be known that he would answer only to the name Muhammad Ali. (Library of Congress)

13. Terence Conran in his element. (Independent/Alamy Stock Photo)

14. Mary Quant.

15. Britain’s briefly famous vocal trio The Paper Dolls, seen wearing Quant’s most celebrated design. The miniskirt offered women a chance to feel bold and enfranchised, and provided a tantalising hint of underwear for men.

16. England’s enterprising cricket captain Ted Dexter (right) strides to the wicket with his Sussex County teammate Jim Parks. (PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo)

17. The swashbuckling Dexter figure of the jet-propelled racing world Donald Campbell, who broke both land- and water-speed records in 1964. (GP Library Limited/Alamy Stock Photo)

18. Ken Russell, who directed his first feature film, a soggy seaside comedy called French Dressing, in 1964. He’s seen here on the set of another film with Michael Caine.

19. Peter Cook, who developed his monotonal alter ego E.L. Wisty in 1964. Rebuffed in his ambition to become a judge after his lack of Latin had caused him to fail ‘the rigorous judging exams’, Wisty opted for a career as a coal miner instead.

20. The American comic Lenny Bruce, later said to have died of ‘an overdose of police’. (Archive PL/Alamy Stock Photo)

21. Simultaneously terrifying and absurd, Nikita Khrushchev began his term as Soviet leader in 1953 expounding his vision of a new communist world order, and ended it eleven years later obsessing about the construction of Moscow lavatory seats. (Library of Congress)

22. Perhaps Khrushchev’s most enduring legacy was the so-called Anti-Fascist Protection Device, or Berlin Wall, as others came to know it. (Library of Congress)

23. Winston Churchill, who bowed out of the House of Commons in July 1964 at the age of 89, seen here with the American financier Bernard Baruch. (Library of Congress)

24. Robert Boothby, a fitfully brilliant Tory MP who combined formidable oratorical skills with the morals of an alley cat. (Wikimedia Commons/Allan Warren)

25. Sean Connery during the filming of Goldfinger. (ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv/Fotograf: Comet Photo AG (Zürich)/Com_C13-035-006/CC BY-SA 4.0)

26. Roman Polanski with his young actress wife Sharon Tate, who later became a victim of the psychotic Manson cult.

27. Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, the first in his celebrated spaghetti-western trilogy.

28. The eye-catching ‘monokini’, worn here by the model Peggy Moffitt, which attracted widespread public interest but never quite found a mass market in the British climate. (© William Claxton, via WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

29. Tyneside schoolchildren waiting excitedly for Harold Wilson on the election campaign trail. Wilson’s Pied Piper effect on the young was unprecedented in British politics, although America had seen it all before with John F. Kennedy. (Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

30. The pipe-smoking Wilson (he preferred a cigar in private) who duly took Labour back into power in 1964 after thirteen years of opposition, seen with President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson won the US election that year in a landslide, even if it all went wrong for him from there.

31. Sam Cooke, the wildly popular American singer whose December 1964 death was ruled justifiable homicide, despite evidence to the contrary.

32. Stanley Matthews, whose thirty-three-year-long football career ended only after he was knighted at the age of 49 on New Year’s Day 1965.

INTRODUCTION

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

I spent most of 1964 as a 7-year-old schoolchild in an unprepossessing ghetto of south London, amid bricks and soot and cratered streets, where milk bottles, which sometimes spontaneously exploded in the cold, were delivered each morning by a man in an apron riding a horse-drawn cart. My mother went to the shops almost every day, not because we were gluttons but because our fridge was roughly the size of a small suitcase and we lacked a freezer. Our local grocery store, which went by the perhaps leading name of Mr Crooke’s, was staffed by two or three middle-aged men also in aprons, had sawdust on the floor and closed early each Thursday. For Sunday lunch we generally treated ourselves to a joint of Mr Crooke’s sweaty pink beef accompanied by a salad soaked in a brown oil that doubled as earwax remover. Our house was a poorly ventilated semi with postage-stamp-sized rooms patched together by crumbling plaster walls, although we aspired to that era’s defining domestic status symbol of full indoor plumbing. ‘Bloody lucky, too,’ my father, then a landbound navy officer, remarked. The hint of amused irony behind the genuine conviction that we could have been much worse off was unmistakable.

Each weekday morning my father caught a commuter train for its last couple of stops into Waterloo, an experience he rarely spoke of fondly, and then walked over the bridge to his desk job in the Stalinist-looking bulk of the Ministry of Defence. A long-running power dispute involving the Amalgamated Engineering Union and their demand for a maximum forty-hour week periodically plunged all the houses in our street into total darkness, and when this happened we sat around in unheated rooms, the TV set – which, reversing the formula of the fridge, was the size of a coffin – shut off, reading flimsily printed newspapers by candlelight. My school classroom, about a mile away, included a pot-bellied stove and a row of wooden desks with a communal inkwell, into which we dipped our blue Osmiroid nibs. There was a framed official portrait of a youthful-looking Queen on the wall. The water emerged from the school’s bathroom taps, to a cacophony of clanking pipes, with the consistency of sticky red hair oil and at only one temperature: glacial. You had to break the ice some winter afternoons when taking a knee-bath after playing compulsory football or rugby. There may have been no village in the Carpathians quite as primitive as our part of London in the immediate run-up to the Swinging Sixties.

Even so, there was evidence that certain individuals might soon come to inject a splash of colour into the sepia tones that seemed to wash over the British landscape like a Victorian group photograph. By the spring of 1964 you could almost see their hopeful little heads poking out of the soil. There were the Beatles, to give just the most obvious example. The four impish Scousers had closed out the old year with a thirty-seven-date tour of Britain’s art deco fleapits from Carlisle to Portsmouth. At each stop a ruffle-shirted compère would bound on stage and demand, ‘Do you want to see John?’ (Roars). ‘Paul?’ (Roars). ‘George?’ (Roars). ‘Ringo?’ (Mayhem). A frantic pop party then ensued, with stretcher cases and arrests. As the curtain fell each night there was generally a full-scale riot in progress, suddenly ended, as if by a thrown switch, by everyone freezing in place for the national anthem. Early in the new year, the band went off to play in Paris and Paul McCartney had them send up a grand piano to his hotel room, the better to work on some of the songs that became A Hard Day’s Night. That the quartet were each reportedly making £100 a week (£1,500 today) didn’t slow them down: just the reverse. Later that winter McCartney turned up for a brainstorming session at John Lennon’s suburban home, as it happened not too far from ours, with the words, ‘Let’s write ourselves a swimming pool.’ Meanwhile, George Harrison was worried about keeping up payments on his new car, and Ringo just wanted to make enough to open his own hair salon. All four Beatles thought the band was a gas, but that it would be forgotten again in a year or two.

Harold Macmillan had resigned as Britain’s prime minister in October 1963, ostensibly on health grounds but really a victim of that year’s Profumo scandal, with its cast of characters including the eponymous Secretary of State for War, a society osteopath and sexual procurer named Stephen Ward, the assistant Soviet naval attaché, a pair of exotic, spliff-smoking West Indians, and two equally free-spirited young women of, as the parlance of the day had it, doubtful reputation. The press wasn’t slow to build the affair into a cause célèbre that linked not only senior members of the Macmillan Cabinet but Britain’s ruling elite as a whole to an underworld of prostitutes, pimps, spies, topless go-go dancers and unusual household practices. ‘The whole United Kingdom government has become a sort of brothel,’ The Times was left to sigh. I remember my father reading his evening paper around this time, grunting when he came to a certain passage, and remarking in a hushed tone to my mother that the news was all about ‘s-e-x’ those days. At that my mother had glanced hastily in my direction and put a finger to her lips. I respected the effort, but as it happened I’d recently learned the word for myself. I discovered it at school, where another boy had gravely informed me that ‘all the grown-ups – including the people in the Cabinet’ were at it like rabbits, a statement he illustrated by producing a pack of playing cards adorned by photographs of well-upholstered young women. The concept was reinforced via my passing acquaintance with a neighbour by the name of Lulu, whom I sometimes saw waiting for a bus at the end of our street wearing a dress of singularly sparing cut.

For a while in the summer of 1963, the Macmillan government tottered, seemingly fatally wounded. Although it survived, it lost its former aura of respectability. Deference was never quite the same again. Macmillan’s successor in office was the 60-year-old 14th Earl of Home (or plain Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as he became), a man whose misfortune it was in the television age to resemble a prematurely hatched bird and whose Adam’s apple danced rapidly up and down his narrow neck. His selection was not noticeably a step in the direction of modernising Britain. It was thought the wily, 47-year-old Labour leader Harold Wilson, ostentatiously puffing his pipe in public while enjoying a good cigar in private, understood the medium rather better. TV was ‘open to abuse by any charlatan capable of manipulating it properly, and so it proved in 1964,’ Wilson’s future opponent Edward Heath noted.

Both major political parties continued to struggle with the fallout of the tragicomic Suez affair of November 1956, when the British forces were comprehensively reverse-ferreted from their attempt to seize control of the canal zone amidst a disastrous run on sterling and the unexpected opposition of the Americans, and had since committed to phasing out their bases, harbours and other imperial-era establishments throughout the Middle East. Both also grappled with their stance on what was then called the European Common Market, the French having just vetoed Britain’s latest application to join the club. To a certain generation of Britons, it must seem as if their whole lives have been spent in the shadow of a stale and still not wholly resolved debate about their nation’s proper place on the Continent. As a whole, Macmillan’s premiership from 1957–63 falls broadly into a first half, where he appeared to be in charge of events, and a second half, which was increasingly devoted to dealing with domestic and foreign disasters. Coming to power at a time when respect for one’s ‘betters’ still predominated in all walks of life, and leaving it amidst a satirical firestorm that lampooned the PM as a broken-down figure presiding over an inept and sexually incontinent regime, Macmillan’s seven-year tenure was the trigger point for Britain’s 1960s modernisation crisis.

Aside from the accelerating plague of rock and roll, British parents were confronted by certain other unmistakable signs that the rallying legacy represented by the Dunkirk Spirit and the illusion of continuing post-war unity was starting to crack. Films as diverse as Dr Strangelove, Girl With Green Eyes, The Chalk Garden, King & Country, Of Human Bondage, The Pumpkin Eater and Zulu all appeared on British screens in 1964, each offering at least a hint of social commentary or satire about class distinctions. Joe Orton’s first play Entertaining Mr Sloane was an immediate succès de scandale when performed at London’s Arts Theatre that May. The opening act, in which a dowdy, middle-aged woman picks up a young, good-looking psychopath and informs him how positively she would react to any romantic overtures he might care to make to her gave notice that this was something other than traditional, all-round family entertainment. Top of the Pops, Match of the Day and Crossroads all made their debut on British television that year. The Rolling Stones released their first album in April, another key moment in blasting the parochial shackles off British pop music, perhaps even more so than the Beatles. Around the Stones in 1964 there was always the sound of fans braying and squealing, MCs sternly calling for order and police chiefs rumbling ‘Disgraceful!’ The headlines followed suit: ‘Thugs’, ‘Cavemen’, ‘Apes’ was the consensus, another sign that Britain as a whole might be a rather more divided place than the self-sufficient island nation of, say, 1954.

The national press for 2 January 1964, the day marking the beginning of the end of the extended festive season, showed some of the country’s new spirit of egalitarianism alongside an icy touch of old-school class sensitivity. The Daily Herald led with the perennial ‘Drive Drink Off The Road!’ as its takeaway message, along with a variety of other such slogans that seemed to have been lifted direct from a local police authority press release. Over at the Mirror, ‘The Spirit of 1964’ was the splash, which the paper illustrated by a picture of a donkey-jacketed man sitting atop a high-rise beam on a building site in central Manchester with a ‘glass of bubbly’, thus literally straddling the two worlds. Elsewhere, we learn that Prince Charles and Princess Anne had enjoyed a ‘fab twist session’. The royals, aged 15 and 13 respectively, had gone to a ‘beat dance at the mansion home of Major and Mrs. John Bagge at Stradsett Hall, near Sandringham’, with more than 100 other youths; the prince wore a ‘casual sweater and tapered trousers’, while his sister sported a ‘light-coloured dress’ of daring cut, a mere ‘two or three inches below the knee’. The Daily Express carried the grim news that carpet prices were set to increase by a rather precise 7.5 per cent during the year, while there were more traffic-related concerns at the Telegraph, with the prospect of the ‘compulsory destruction of hundreds of homes and the displacement of their unfortunate inhabitants to make way for new speedways to accommodate an eternal procession of gargantuan lorries and cars travelling at over 50 miles an hour’.

There was more elsewhere in the tabloids about the world of floor coverings, with the repeated invitation to buy one of Ulster-based Cyril Lord’s ‘fabulous, quality products’ at direct-from-the-factory prices, with a free bottle of Swift Rug Shampoo thrown in. Meanwhile, Pontins was offering DIY holidays in one of its luxury chalets, each with ‘lounge, bedroom, fully fitted kitchen, bathroom and even a TV!’ at such exclusive resorts as Skegness or Rockey Sands in Dorset, starting at just £3 per person per week. For the more adventurous, there were the charms of fourteen days on the Bulgarian Riviera priced from 32½ guineas, exclusive of flights. If you wanted, you could buy a state-of-the art Imperial washing machine – still a novelty in many British households, partly because the electricity grid in much of the country could only support a limited number of appliances in each home – for just £85 (£1,275 today), or 12s 11d a week on the three-year instalment plan. Or you could treat yourself to a pair of extravagantly heeled ‘Cuban Bootle Boots’ for 79s 11d (around £60 today); a ‘stylish elastic corselet’ to ‘banish that spare tyre look’ for 59s; or some modish Directoire Knickers, ‘warm and comfortable where it counts for the chilly days ahead’ at five bob each. There was a good deal more in the press promoting the virtues of cars, cameras, cold remedies, cod-liver oil, denture repairs, trusses and medical aids in general. National expenditure on retail advertising rose from £102 million in 1952 to £1.8 billion in 1964.

To judge from the press, Britain’s employment landscape then hung in a sort of extended Georgian limbo. The ‘Wanted’ columns still had rows of openings for household servants, private chauffeurs (‘only well-spoken men need apply’) and ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ for unspecified immediate menial labour. Recruitment to the Prison Service was apparently a particular issue, because many of the papers carried invitations to apply for a position as a guard or other officer, at rates starting at £12 10s a week for men and £9 10s for women, which compared to the average white-collar wage of the day of £15 and £11 10s respectively.

Scanning the real-estate columns, you could find a ‘magnificent 4-bedroom villa’ for sale in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, for £5,150 o.n.o., or one of the same size in Banstead, Surrey, for £7,800. A new Morris Oxford car without extras would set you back around £750, although you could drive off in a Reliant three-wheeler, unheated, for just £480. Many of the displays for goods and services retained their essential 1950s air of apology for the tastelessness of having to promote their wares in the first place, with taglines such as ‘If we have a rival in our field, we should be glad to hear of it,’ or ‘Any Interested Parties are invited to correspond, or call by appointment at our Premises.’ There was a splash of the exotic to some of the advertisements for credit cards, flared trousers, Cuban boots and foreign holidays, but what strikes one most about the lives of most ordinary Britons is that they seemed to have changed so little, not so much, from the protracted aftermath of the Second World War, an era characterised by icy nights in gaslit rooms, a diet of whale fat and Spam, and all the other comically vile ingredients of a serious sacrifice none of those who endured it ever forgot.

Of course it’s almost always a mistake to try and assemble random historical facts into a neatly unified pattern that few people would have recognised at the time. Whether in their claim that Britain overnight became a socialist mecca with the advent of the welfare state in 1945, or that the country abruptly succumbed to a priapic frenzy characterised by the sight of bare-thighed young women swaggering around Carnaby Street in their Mary Quant miniskirts to a backdrop of herbally-tinged joss sticks and the wafted strains of the Grateful Dead in the so-called Summer of Love twenty-two years later – with a sort of communal nervous breakdown triggered by the Suez Crisis at the midpoint between the two poles – social historians are always keen to identify what seem to them to be the transformative shifts in our national life. Such judgements are generally only feasible with the aid of hindsight. Few of those confronted by the individual pieces of the jigsaw can picture the completed puzzle.

In that spirit, perhaps the best way to briefly refresh our memories of 1964 is not to display a list of dates of domestic or international events, but to follow a modestly well-off young couple living in Dartford, or Luton, or Pontefract, or Dundee – it hardly matters which – through the routine of an ordinary day in January 1964. To do so may be nostalgic, but it isn’t necessarily to mourn the lost Eden of a communitarian past.

From the appearance of the man of the house as he comes to the breakfast table on this winter morning, you would hardly know you weren’t in the 1950s; the movement of male fashion since the war is glacial. His young wife, as life partners were then called, might conceivably have made a gesture toward the coming sartorial whirligig of the Sixties with some gaudily coloured knee socks or stockings, or a pair of platform heels, but wasn’t yet likely to have abandoned herself to what Mary Quant evocatively described as her ideal of a modern woman dressed in ‘a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories [that] were much more for life, much more for real people, much more for being young and alive in’.

Breakfast over, the male half of the sketch might get in his car – the Morris, perhaps, or an equally sensible Vauxhall Victor or Ford Consul – or entrust himself to the only mixed charms of British Railways, as the system was then called, which was in the process of axing a third of its passenger services as well as 4,200 of its 7,000 stations. At that time, rail fares were still calculated not as a result of the party in charge having ingested some mind-altering drug, but by the simple expedient of using a flat rate for the distance travelled, which in 1964 was threepence per mile second class, and 4s 2d per mile first class, meaning a single journey between Guildford and Waterloo would have cost you about eighty-four pence, or seven shillings, roughly £5.25 in today’s money.

London itself, if that’s where our man ended up, was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of narrow, serpentine streets and then home to about 8 million people, which represented a slow but steady downward population trend that continued until the early 1980s. The Underground system at that time favoured an unpainted aluminium carriage as its rolling stock, and as a rule would have been about half as congested as it is today. In 1964 the total distance travelled by all passengers on the Tube stood at around 3.1 billion miles, compared with nearly 7 billion miles just before the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020. The ambient smell on the train itself would have been one of stale or active tobacco smoke, among other, less immediately identifiable aromas: although there were many honourable exceptions, the average British adult in 1964 (though far less likely to be obese than his modern counterpart) tended not to overdo it in terms of personal hygiene, with 31 per cent of those discreetly surveyed by the Metropolitan Water Board revealing that they preferred to bathe only on a Sunday.

The frivolous side of the Sixties – fashion, pop culture, sex – was unlikely to have asserted itself in our protagonist’s place of work, which, again with significant exceptions, was apt to be a sober-minded retreat that was predominantly white and male, with women largely confined to their traditional roles as objects for decorative and secretarial purposes. The general rule was that the bosses expected absolute female subservience, total discretion, and the demurely efficient supervision of the office kitchen.

In the course of his day on the front lines, our man might have the opportunity to discuss prevailing business conditions. It seems things are generally looking up: the Financial Times 30-share index, the precursor to today’s FTSE, continued to show modest gains, and the pound was then worth roughly three times more than the dollar on the foreign exchange. The Bank of England report for the twelve months ending 29 February 1964 began on a sanguine note:

The year under review was one of rapid development in the domestic economy, and of expanding markets abroad for British goods. The challenge is to ensure that demand does not expand faster than output can satisfy, and that costs and prices not rise unduly … At the very end of the period, on 27 February 1964, Bank rate was raised to 5 per cent.

It seemed everybody was talking about the bright prospects for overseas trade and the exciting new opportunities for the ordinary British consumer to avail themselves of luxury goods such as deep freezes, televisions and fitted carpets. There were too many strikes, it was true, and the long-running industrial action by Britain’s 128,000 electrical power workers would periodically seem to recede only to flare up again, like a repeatedly treated but never fully cured virus. The labouring classes as a whole were considered capital, as opposed to ‘human resources’, although homelessness, that unfortunate waste product of an economic system increasingly designed to exploit workers for the benefit of Eyes Wide Shut partying overlords, didn’t seem to be much of an issue.

As it turned out, the Bank of England’s rosy forecast for the year ahead proved something of a misjudgement. What the Bank tactfully referred to as a ‘period of rapid development’ in 1964 seems in retrospect to have been one of reckless boom, with Britain’s current account sliding ever further into the red. When the new Labour chancellor Jim Callaghan took office in October, he imagined that the nation’s balance of payments might be as much as £500m in arrears. Waiting for him on his desk was an elegant folder prepared by his new permanent secretary, Sir William Armstrong, containing a two-page summary of the true state of affairs. It opened with the time-honoured salutation: ‘We greet the esteemed Chancellor’, but rapidly went downhill from there. The actual deficit in Britain’s trade figures was just over £805m. According to Callaghan, as he sat contemplating the full horror of the document in front of him, his predecessor in office, Reginald Maudling, walked past on his way out, carrying a pile of suits over his arm, and paused to stick his head in the door of his old study. ‘“Good luck, old cock,” Maudling said cheerfully. “Sorry to leave it in such a mess.” Then he smiled, stuck his trilby on his head and sauntered off.’

Our leading man would have known little or none of this as he stepped outside for lunch, where he might have encountered a few self-consciously ‘with it’ displays of primary-coloured shirts, ruffled and splayed open at the chest as if for imminent heart surgery, or some tentative signs of the new vogue for geometric-shaped skirts made of tinsel-like PVC, a material that fitted ‘into current fashion like an astronaut into his capsule,’ Queen magazine informed its readers. Of course, most people, of all ages and at every walk of life, oblivious to the great anthropomorphic trends they were later said to embody, simply dressed in their old utilitarian way. In most small towns and villages in the Britain of 1964 you still saw children with hair cut close to the scalp to avoid lice and nits, with teeth uneven, broken or missing, wrapped in sack-like garments that looked like the family dog had just vomited on them, and as often as not reared in neighbourhoods cross-hatched by rows of Victorian terraced slums with a back door that opened directly onto an outhouse, and largely distinguished by their stagnant canals, endless one-way systems and mortuaries, with an air of fatigue and chronic naffness (‘Fresh AND Frozen’, ‘REAL Imitation Antiques!’) that revealed a nation poised between its baroque past and modern tat so richly characteristic of Britain’s provincial outposts. As the actor Michael Caine noted to a friend after a working trip to the industrial northeast, ‘The press is always going on about this Cockney-git image I’ve got and so on, but now I’ve been to Newcastle I realise I’m middle class.’

Our protagonist’s midday meal, if taken at one of the new Chinese or Indian restaurants springing up around the UK, or perhaps aspiring to the full, three-course Berni Inn Family Platter, might have cost eleven or twelve shillings, with an accompanying pint of tepid lager at 2s 3d, respectively some £9 and £1.75 today. If he smoked, as over 70 per cent of British men and 40 percent of women then did, a packet of twenty Rothmans would have knocked him back around five shillings (£3.75), roughly the same as a gallon of high-octane petrol to speed him on his drive home. No one really spoke about the toxic, ashes-to-ashes risks we associate with cigarettes today, although in December 1963 one local authority in the south-west of England daringly prepared a cautionary leaflet for distribution in schools. The following is a representative extract of the language used:

Always puffin’ a fag – squares, Never snuffin’ the habit – squares, Drop it, doll, be smart, be sharp! Cool cats wise, And cats remain, Non-smokers, doll, in this campaign.

Not for the last time, an official government initiative may conceivably have produced the opposite result to the one intended.

Back home, meanwhile – and in this context it should be remembered that only one in four married women was working in 1964 – our principal’s wife might have been diligently navigating through the minefield of early closing, or shortages, or merely of the routine challenge of popping down to the local high street, as most people still did rather than consolidating their shopping into one weekly trip to the supermarket, let alone the unheard-of joys of doing so online. Depending on taste and the presence of suitable kitchen equipment, there might be a few modest innovations in the couple’s menu that night. As the social historian Dominic Sandbrook writes, ‘Avocados, aubergines and courgettes were becoming increasingly familiar, while dinner-party guests were no longer surprised to be offered prawn cocktail or coq au vin from the hostess’s new trolley.’ (The guests themselves, if not previously familiar with the area, would have been armed with local directions along the lines of ‘Third on the left past the diseased tree at the back of the pub …’ rather than those of today’s personal-navigation industry.) Meat and two veg was still the staple diet, although the popular frozen Vesta curries and chow mein provided the first taste for many Britons of ‘foreign grub’.

If the couple in question fancied a quiet night in, they may have switched on the radiogram or the television, the latter often a vast, fake wood device that doubled as a piece of furniture. On a typical weekday evening they could watch a two-channel line-up that ranged from Coronation Street, All Our Yesterdays and Panorama through to a few light-hearted American imports like My Favorite Martian or The Lucy Show, and a fifteen-minute main BBC news bulletin with a distinct touch of the ancien régime about it, both in terms of its booming, Soviet-style theme music and the almost impenetrably fruity accent of its presenter. By 1964 there were radio and TV programmes, magazines, shops, products and whole industries that bowed to the young, but apparently no one had yet brought this fact to the attention of the current affairs department of the nation’s broadcaster.

Our mythical couple’s home may have had the luxury of inbuilt heating, or just as likely they would have relied on a stone hot-water bottle or a Princess electric blanket to get through the long winter night. It wasn’t unknown to wake up to find a layer of frost on the bedclothes, or icicles dangling on the inside of the windows in many middle-class British homes of the day. The standard way of making a bed was with layers of sheets and blankets, with an eiderdown on top, although thanks to the retailer Terence Conran, to whom we’ll return, a few enterprising customers were soon experimenting with ‘continental quilts’, as duvets were then known, a flashy foreign interloper on the linens market.

We can perhaps leave our couple in peace at their bedroom door, although it’s worth noting that the swinging conjugal etiquette widely associated with the Summer of Love and its aftermath may in fact have gotten off to a head start earlier in the decade. Eustace Chesser’s seminal Love Without Fear: A Plain Guide to Sex Technique for Every Married Adult, retailing at six shillings, had sold an astonishing 3.2 million copies by July 1964, while the Marriage Guidance Council’s recently published manual How to Treat a Young Wife contained the radical notion that women were no less libidinous than men, and that ‘simultaneous orgasm is a highly desirable ideal.’

It’s a truism, but one perhaps worth repeating, that British society as a whole was more sharply polarised then than it is now. For those passing the eleven-plus exam there was grammar school, with its prospect of university, the professions or the civil service. So a young man like our hero here might be commuting to and from his city-centre office and taking his wife for an occasional night out in the West End of London, or even on a flying overseas holiday, or he might be screwing caps on to bottles on a provincial assembly line for a take-home wage of two or three pounds a day, with a fortnight’s seaside caravanning as the height of his recreational dreams. In either case, as Britons gradually went about their business on the cold Wednesday morning of 1 January 1964 they would almost certainly never have heard of Concorde, colour TV or pirate radio, of Habitat, home computers, The Sun, ATMs, A Hard Day’s Night, New York Times v. Sullivan, indoor shopping centres, the Channel Tunnel, Milton Keynes, BBC2, Match of the Day, gay rights, Valium or the Viet Cong.

The swinging year lay before them.

I

WINTER

‘WE ALL WENT TO BED WITH VICTOR’

On the stormy afternoon of Monday 9 December 1963, the day after a lightning strike had caused a Pan Am jet to explode over the American east coast with the loss of all eighty-one souls aboard, a 35-year-old man wearing a light sharkskin suit and dark glasses boarded the first-class cabin of a Boeing 707 operated by the same airline for the nine-hour flight from Chicago’s O’Hare airport to London Heathrow. The passenger was a trim, youthful figure whose upturned nose and pinched, quizzical expression gave him a vaguely feral air – in one former lover’s uncharitable phrase, like that of an ‘evil mole’ – along with a hint of schoolboy impishness. One close friend of the time described him as looking like a ‘naughty kid who’s just run away from ringing someone’s doorbell’, while another said that in light of the ‘slightly overdone costumes and knowing leer permanently clamped on his face, you somehow always expected a row of naked ladies to suddenly appear and start dancing around behind him’.

This last image may not have been entirely fanciful, because the passenger’s name was Victor Lownes, and he was on his way to London to open the city’s first Playboy Club. If he had any misgivings about boarding a plane in the circumstances that prevailed that afternoon, he kept them from his two young companions, now remembered only as Mai and Tai, and ungallantly described as ‘devoid of thought but so top-heavy you wondered they didn’t fall over as they walked’. Lownes himself promptly bent down to kiss the ground when he landed safely at Heathrow shortly before midday on 10 December, not so much out of relief, he insisted, but in sheer gratitude at finding himself in the ‘greatest city on earth’. As if to illustrate the fact, ‘the sun came out just as we touched down over a whole country that seemed green and pleasant, wonderfully bright, and determined to have a good time’.

Lownes spent the remaining weeks of 1963 in a twenty-fifth-floor suite at London’s newly opened Hilton on Park Lane, long remembering his delight in a ‘red’ city (‘all those great phone booths and buses and postboxes’) apparently teeming with ‘bouncy, free-spirited types with longer hair and shorter skirts than the kids back home’. As a surface observation, this was probably true enough. But perhaps Lownes failed to similarly register the ranks of bus drivers, nurses, school janitors, dustmen and waiters who serviced the soon-to-be swinging city but couldn’t themselves afford to live there, and were forced to cohabit with their parents or to find housing in the distant suburbs, commuting in on the most congested roads in Europe or else on the sadly reduced rail network. It’s always tempting to cling to a cinematic image a particular city might present to us: you hop off the Greyhound bus in Los Angeles, and the cloud of exhaust clears to reveal you, smiling and arms thrown wide, ready to finally be discovered; or impeccably dressed Brits march past on Westminster Bridge, identical black brollies held at the furl, while Big Ben obligingly chimes overhead. ‘Maybe I bought the idea of London,’ Lownes would admit years later:

The place wasn’t just about bricks and mortar. It was about spirit. I was in love with the thought of dolly-birds sashaying up and down Kings Road, not with the delayed 7.25 train from Leatherhead with the blocked loo, chuntering past the corrugated retail units in the pouring rain. Both were real, but in my England it was always Saturday night, and it was always cool.

On 2 January 1964, Lownes placed an advertisement in The Times’s personal columns: ‘American millionaire seeks a flat in the most fashionable part of London. Must be exclusive. Rents up to £100 a week.’

This, too, has a certain cinematic quality to it; as in a stylised Hollywood film, a gay young blade arrives in a promised land, ready to throw his money around, inviting the audience to vicariously share in the thrill of it all – and also in the protagonist’s ultimate ruin.

In due course, Lownes found suitable accommodations at 3 Montpelier Square, opposite Harrods, whose rent fell comfortably within his budget at a weekly 75 guineas, or £1,250 in today’s money. He never lost his sense of awed affection for England, where he lived for most of the remaining fifty-three years of his life. ‘There were one or two speed bumps along the way,’ he admitted to me – among them his financing of Roman Polanski’s treatment of Macbeth that went disastrously over budget, and in time led Lownes to describe the film’s celebrated director as an ‘egomaniacal dwarf’; or for that matter the abrupt closure of the then loss-making Playboy Club in 1981 – ‘but I still say that bliss it was to be alive in the early Sixties and to be in London was very heaven. And no, I never did take the 7.25 or any other train from Leatherhead.’

Of course, a wealthy American import essentially in the business of dressing pneumatic young women in a get-up of a snug-fitting corset teddy, collar, cuffs and a fluffy cottontail may not be entirely representative of the average resident of the United Kingdom in 1964, or for that matter any other year. But Lownes is still an interesting case study of assimilation into the British life of the day. He was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1928, into a privileged family with a lucrative interest in the Yale lock business. As a child he received an early education in the facts of life from a teenaged nanny who gave her young charge detailed accounts of her sexual liaisons along with his bedtime bath, a narrative she sometimes illustrated by exposing her breasts. At the age of 12, Victor accidentally shot and killed his best friend, an episode that resulted in his enrolment at a New Mexico military academy. From there he graduated to the University of Chicago, and eventually found employment with the family firm. ‘I was promoted to manager within a few months,’ Lownes would later note, ‘due solely to hard work, conscientiousness and the fact that my grandfather owned the company.’ At a party in 1954, he met Hugh Hefner, who had just launched Playboy magazine. Lownes came on board as marketing director, and was credited with overseeing a Viagra-like rise in the periodical’s circulation figures. Among his contributions was the long-running campaign featuring the tagline ‘What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?’ At its peak, the answer was an astonishing 5.8 million subscribers a month. Lownes also steered Playboy into starting its own TV channel, and eventually to opening its namesake clubs all over the world. London seemed to him to be the centre of all that was young and fresh in late 1963, somewhere you could be whatever you wanted, and ‘only squares called other people promiscuous, by which they really meant you were getting more sex than they were.’ The fact that Britain had recently legalised casino gambling didn’t hurt, either.

Twice married, with children, Lownes tended to eschew the traditional monogamous ideal. Stocks, the former girls’ boarding school he bought for £107,000 in the Hertfordshire countryside, long retained a vestige of its previous role as a training camp for Playboy bunnies. Lownes furnished the fifteen bedrooms to reflect the lifestyle promoted by the magazine, and had the home’s public areas fitted out with erotic Mogul statues, a private disco, and what was allegedly the largest jacuzzi in the world. ‘We all went to bed with Victor,’ admitted one former inmate. ‘He used to have five girls a day, sometimes two at a time,’ recalled another, ‘Angie’, who was 19 when she went to be trained at Stocks. ‘I did think I’d make him a very good third wife, but when I was asked to move up to the attic, I knew it had gone pear-shaped.’

So perhaps Lownes falls some way short of the ideal male archetype scraping by in the Britain of 1964, with just enough left over on Friday night for the five-bob Smugglers Grill plate at the local Golden Egg followed by a stalls ticket to Zorba the Greek. But he was certainly one of those who now saw the English capital as the unchallenged style capital of the West, with a gaudy, youth-driven energy that made other European cities seem dowdy by comparison and to which he himself in a small degree contributed. As Lownes recalled, ‘there was something in the air’ in London, a mix of ancient and modern, where one could see a ‘young bit in a miniskirt in the same frame as a couple of old City boys marching around in suits and bowler hats’, already apparent by the time he excitedly bounded down the steps from his bumpy overnight flight from Chicago in December 1963.

***

There was a moment rich in significance for the future of the British press, and for public discourse as a whole, when, in March 1963, 51-year-old Randolph Churchill, only son of the nation’s wartime premier, issued a flurry of writs for defamation against the recently launched satirical magazine Private Eye. As is so often the case in libel, the facts of the matter were both simple and a trifle ludicrous. That February, the Eye had published a back-page strip commenting on the fact that Churchill had been lucky enough to win the commission to write his father’s official biography. An apparently harmless joke was made of the fact that Randolph, like most eminent biographers, employed the services of a team of research assistants to help him compile the facts – along with the suggestion, made in similarly humorous vein, that certain events in the still-living Sir Winston’s long and tumultuous life might not be presented in the finished book entirely in the same light in which they had been seen originally by his contemporaries.

It would be fair to say that Randolph Churchill did not react with the same sort of jocundity as that intended by Private Eye. In fact he was livid. Those who witnessed the author’s fury on the subject would long marvel at the scene, speaking of it in hushed tones like old salts recalling a historic hurricane. ‘Those utter shits,’ he shouted down the phone to his wartime comrade Evelyn Waugh when coming to describe his journalistic antagonists, amidst a flow of other soldierly language so ripe that Waugh felt it best to hold the receiver away from his ear. Nor did Churchill’s ire end there. On 11 February he fired off a sharp letter to the offending magazine, demanding an explanation of the ‘points made in your cartoon’. Unfortunately, the editor of Private Eye, to whom Randolph’s letter had been addressed, was unable to reply at once, since he was on holiday in Scotland. He returned to London to find that writs had been issued wholesale against all twelve members of the Eye’s staff – two of them actually addressed to fictional nicknames that appeared on the masthead – and that Churchill had retained the services of 49-year-old Peter Carter-Ruck, the man who became synonymous with libel law in Britain and who went on to enjoy a virtual season ticket to the High Court in his encounters with the Eye, where, with a certain inevitability, he was known by the slightly amended name of ‘Peter Carter-Fuck’.

An opportunity of the sort provided by Churchill’s brief was meat and drink to Ruck, in whose initial approach there was none of the gentlemanly reserve that characterised most other solicitors’ correspondence of the time. Imperious in tone, his letter set a strict timeframe for the magazine’s response to the ‘most disgraceful opprobrium heaped upon our client’s good name’, or else invited them to settle their differences in court. (To further their chances of success, he had Churchill retain all the UK’s available libel QCs to prevent them acting for the opposition, a practice since banned.) Faced with the prospect of financial ruin, Private Eye settled for £3,000 (around £45,000 today), the price of their publishing Churchill’s letter of complaint splashed over a full page in the London Evening Standard, thus ensuring roughly twelve times as many people heard of the matter as saw the original cartoon, along with a grovelling apology for any unspecified remarks that might have impugned either the divinity of Sir Winston Churchill or the literary excellence of his son.

In due course, Carter-Ruck would go on to help define the whole concept of what constituted an acceptable attitude towards Britain’s great and good, in the process doing for freedom of speech what Charles Manson did for struggling California singer-songwriters. Nothing was more likely to spoil a newspaper editor’s morning than the couriered arrival of a letter bearing the dreaded lawyer’s return address. Litigation ‘waft[ed] the breath of life to me,’ Carter-Ruck, one of those simultaneously comic and sinister figures familiar from the pages of Dickens, once confided. He would even, as a scorpion when aroused will supposedly sting itself, sue his own colleagues, when, for instance, in the early 1980s some of the partners in his firm rashly suggested he might retire. (On resolving that particular dispute to his advantage, Ruck had increased the sensation of pain by turning the signet ring on his right index finger inward, so that the jewels would bite deep into his former colleagues’ flesh when they shook hands.) En route few prisoners were taken, and huge costs were incurred. Carter-Ruck would become almost as well known for his final bills as for his results. Among his most cherished possessions at the time of his death in 2003 were a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow with the number plate L1BEL, along with a racing yacht he christened Fair Judgement.

It’s worth mentioning Carter-Ruck here not only because he did so much to successfully exploit the draconian libel laws in England and Wales, but because these stood in such contrast to the standards established elsewhere in 1964. More specifically, there was the landmark judgement that March of New York Times v. Sullivan that still resonates today. The case arose from a paid advertisement in the USA’s daily newspaper of record, headlined ‘Heed Their Rising Voices’, which among other things claimed that police forces around the country were attempting to derail America’s civil rights struggle through acts of ‘institutional racism and violence’. One Lester B. Sullivan, an elected official in Montgomery, Alabama, in charge of supervising that city’s police, brought a suit against the paper on the grounds that inaccuracies in the ad had lowered his reputation. An all-white Alabama jury returned a verdict for Sullivan in the full amount demanded – half a million dollars – and the state’s higher court affirmed this. At that stage, the Times appealed to the US Supreme Court, which issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favour of the paper. The verdict resulted in three days of rioting in Alabama.

In the longer term, New York Times v. Sullivan established the principle of ‘actual malice’, which requires that public figures be held to a higher standard of truth than ordinary citizens before they can succeed in a defamation suit. In other words, in the United States – and also many other countries around the world – an aggrieved celebrity has to prove that a distasteful remark about him or her was not merely inaccurate, but was published with the advance knowledge that it was false, or at least with reckless disregard for the truth. As a result, from March 1964 onwards, high-profile litigants would increasingly favour the British court system, where the libel laws generally remain more congenial to the plaintiff. In time, this led to the peculiar spectacle of Lownes’s sometime friend Roman Polanski, a Franco-Polish citizen, choosing to ‘forum shop’ by venting his displeasure at a large New York-based magazine by formally suing its more modest British edition, and even then doing so only by means of a videolink connection lest he himself be arrested on an outstanding warrant relating to his rape of a 13-year-old girl. It seemed to some a curious system that allowed a man like Polanski to be in the enviable position of being able to cherry-pick those parts of the judicial process that suited him, while ignoring those that didn’t.

The fact remains that both in 1964, and throughout the Swinging Sixties and beyond, most British news outlets and their owners were painfully aware that the rules of engagement of the typical libel action had changed little since the days of Queen Victoria, and that the high price of defending such a suit, even when they might believe they had a good case, was like an expensive game of chicken. Under prevailing English law, the loser almost always had to pay the costs of the winner, as well as any damages awarded, which is why the UK press as a whole trod so warily in comparison to its foreign counterparts. If you were an actor or a politician or a business magnate in the England of 1964, and you read something in your morning paper to suggest that your carefully cultivated public persona might not be entirely consistent with your private conduct, you might well feel inclined to pick up the phone to Peter Carter-Ruck or one of his fellow practitioners in a way your equivalent elsewhere in the world wouldn’t. The middle-aged Ruck himself retained the aspect of a ‘civil, but when the time came, murderously assertive shark in the midst of a feeding frenzy’, to quote Victor Lownes, although as Private Eye and many others like it would testify when watching Carter-Ruck in action, a shark might conceivably have had the edge in manners.

In January 1964, Tony Gill was a 23-year-old reporter on £1,400 a year at the Conservative-leaning Daily Sketch, under its superbly urbane editor Howard French. The paper was then selling close to a million copies a day, although sometimes the figure sloshed around like water in a bathtub, gaining or losing 100,000 or so in response to a particularly eye-catching headline or a new readers’ spot-the-ball competition. ‘Old French strutted about in his black suit, buttonhole, shoes highly polished,’ Gill remembers. ‘Handlebar moustache, clipped Sandhurst accent. Very military sort of cove.’ What was more, ‘everyone in the newsroom still wore a jacket and tie, everyone enjoyed a drink and everyone smoked.’ The paper’s few female employees were hired for their looks or willingness to ‘put it about’, regardless of any other skills. For Gill, daily life consisted of commuting in and out on the train from Essex – ‘like the seventh circle of hell most days’ – and laboriously scribbling copy in longhand which was then borne away by an office junior for the scrutiny of some unseen authority figure on the floor above, who might amend it with grammatical revisions or other more narrowly libel-preventive notations, before French himself, returning from his extended lunch at Soho’s Gay Hussar restaurant, deigned to cast an imperious eye over the result.

One of the first stories Gill worked on in this fashion in 1964 was a press release from the US Surgeon General concerning the possible health consequences of tobacco use. It contained the shocking news that cigarette smoking was a probable cause of lung cancer, among several other diseases. There was a subsection in the report quoting a cross-section of consumer reactions, and on the whole these present a stark contrast to the public consensus on the subject today. The following week, a reporter from the BBC’s current-events programme Tonight, hosted by the venerable Cliff Michelmore, went out on the streets of London to ask people there what they thought of it all. One elderly man volunteered that he smoked between thirty and thirty-five cigarettes a day, and might have seemed, by our standards, notably sanguine on the subject. ‘Quite honestly, I think that the end of one’s life is probably more in the hands of almighty God, you know, than in my own hands or the hands of the tobacco manufacturers.’ The Tonight reporter went on to ask a young woman whether, ‘in light of the news out of America’, the enjoyment she got from smoking was worth the risk. ‘I think so, yes,’ she replied evenly. ‘If I’m going to die, I’m going to die, so I might as well enjoy life as it is now.’

Back in the Sketch’s grimy-walled Victorian offices in an alley off London’s Fleet Street, Tony Gill remembers: