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Conversation between 'Today' and '1958'

 

 

TODAY: ‘PIVOTAL YEAR' is a useful cliché. It does the job better than most other forms of words that might express the same idea. According to Chambers: ‘a person or thing upon whom or which something depends or turns’ is a pivot. We can all point to a few key moments in our lives when we took a dramatic decision - or had one taken for us – which changed our life’s direction completely. For example, I didn’t immigrate to New Zealand when I was about twenty four, but it was a close thing. Only my employer’s unwillingness to sponsor me prevented it. If I’d gone, the past forty or so years of my life would have been incalculably different from the way they’ve actually turned out. And the result owes as much to chance or accident as to any series of conscious and deliberate decisions on my part.

 

The first real pivotal year in my life was 1951. It meant changing house, school, friends, everything, at age twelve. The next one was your year, 1958. As you know, I began my first job in London then, and savoured my first exhilarating taste of personal independence. But a momentous personal event is nothing beside its many more significant contemporaries. It’s good to remind yourself periodically of your comparative irrelevance in the larger picture. I may have left home forever in that year of yours, but the only place where that event made the front page was in my own mind.

 

1958: You’re right about that, but some of the larger things don’t go away. Flicking through one compiler’s list of world political events for this year, under the heading ‘Co-existence and Realignment’, four pre-occupations present themselves repeatedly in the wider world: development of nuclear reactors and peaceful uses of nuclear energy; worries over nuclear testing; Iraq and Middle Eastern uncertainties generally; and the launching of satellites, ballistic rockets and other material into space. What would you say about those topics?

 

TODAY: Put simply, I can tell you they haven’t gone away. They’re with us now, just as seriously as ever, fifty years later. We might be seeing them now as even more dangerous threats than we did in your day.

 

1958: Use of space had become a feature of the Cold War through the so-called ‘space race’ between the USA and the USSR (where Nikita Kruschev had just become Politburo chairman). In 1958 the first Sputnik disintegrated after over 1,300 bleeping circuits of the Earth and the first US satellite Explorer I was launched, soon followed by others. America failed in several attempts to fire an unmanned rocket at the Moon (where it would simply crash – for international muscle-flexing purposes, it was enough to say ‘We got one there before the Russians’) and both political blocs continued to send up more satellites and develop their ballistic vehicles.

 

TODAY: Yes, and once it had been won, the so-called ‘space race’ dissolved, the moon was ignored and manned space exploration was abandoned. Now, as our conversation takes place in July 2009, our radio and television programmes are celebrating the first human landing on the moon exactly forty years ago. The whole business has been rejuvenated recently with the US projecting trips again to the Moon and particularly to Mars, and China speaks of launching towards the Moon where they want to build a space station. We have to recognise that such proposals were made before the horrendous financial crash of 2007-8, but it seems that governments will continue to make grand prestige plans whether they can afford them or not.

 

Our 21st century is increasingly shaping up to become the Century of China – an idea completely foreign to the world view of 1958 - though, in time, rapidly modernising India may also come to have a view on that.

 

1958: It certainly would have been out of the question for us here. But there’s no shortage of things that have changed so radically over the intervening fifty years. In my time, American attention was focused on the worrying process of racial desegregation in schools in the Southern states. This was making very slow and often violent progress, including beatings up, agitators and hostile demonstrations and dynamite explosions. In this same year Alaska became the 49th State of the Union -

 

TODAY: If I can interrupt for a moment, in the American Presidential elections of 2008, the governor of that state – a nutty woman called Sarah Palin - was the Republican candidate for Deputy President.  And, I would say, racial issues are still never far below the surface of American life, less institutionalised perhaps, but affecting aspects such as schooling, voting and housing. The devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in summer 2005 revealed some seriously unpleasant attitudes, including some in the very highest reaches of government. Feet were badly dragged in the provision of relief which would not have been dragged if it had been a largely white community. And, while we’re on that subject, in mid-2009 there have even been racially inspired attacks and riots in one of China’s provinces.

 

1958: Yes, it rather shows how slowly people’s deepest attitudes change. It tends to take several generations - if we’re lucky. Let’s move to another disturbed zone. Several events focused attention on the Middle East. Continued unrest between Israel and its Arab neighbours brought a UN Security Council call for tighter controls on the demilitarised zone between Israel and Jordan; King Hussein requested British troops to be sent to Jordan The monarchy in Iraq was overthrown by military revolt, with turmoil on the streets of Baghdad, both Crown Prince and Premier being killed in the coup. Before the year’s end, Britain and America had recognised the Republic of Iraq. In Lebanon, rebel forces were reported active in heavy street fighting in Beirut, where US Marines landed, following President Chamoun’s request for assistance.  How do you see those events playing out fifty years later?

 

TODAY: The international decisions made by different parties in the years following those events are readily traceable to contemporary concerns in that region now. At the time of writing, the Syrians have left Lebanon but only with the American boot behind them, following the former Prime Minister’s assassination in February 2005. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Syria’s influence over the Lebanese government has been reduced. Only the following year Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement bombarded one another for weeks on end. Meanwhile, America, with Britain tagging feebly along behind, has occupied Iraq since 2003 and presides over considerable daily violence. By July 2009 British troops have concluded their active battlefield role and are coming home. The new African-American President Obama wants to reduce US military front-line involvement there and progressively hand over a range of significant responsibilities to the Iraqi authorities, though keeping a strong hand on oil supplies is always top of the agenda. One imagines there will always be thousands of US troops on duty there for the rest of time.

 

Further east, the disputed area of Kashmir now makes the news again, this time as one of the major victims of a huge earthquake also affecting parts of India, Pakistan (very badly) and Afghanistan. It seems that Indian and Pakistani troops and officials are reluctant to co-operate in the rescue and first-aid operations there.

 

1958: That sounds very familiar. In April 1958 India rejected all efforts by a UN envoy to try and settle the Kashmir dispute. In November tension between India and Pakistan rose as India’s PM Nehru said the new Pakistan government (where President Mirza had recently declared martial law, annulled the constitution and dismissed the cabinet) was increasing the chances of war between the two countries.

 

TODAY: Well, it never quite happened, but this troubled and most beautiful part of the world does continue to feature against its will among the developing tensions involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Western powers.

 

1958: Speaking of possibly more hopeful developments, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was founded and launched in this year, and its first 50-mile London-Aldermaston march took place in April. International conferences were held at various times on the suspension of nuclear testing and issues of verification, but we were never really sure that everyone involved actually meant what they said.

 

TODAY: Little change there. What does change is the number of nuclear powers and the question of continuing proliferation, where those powers who’ve had nuclear weapons the longest, like the US and Britain, maintain that those who now want to develop their own should not do so. The older nuclear powers conveniently ignore their own obligations, under the Non-Proliferation Treaty they’ve signed, to reduce their own such arms and move towards eventual nuclear disarmament. Today the main sources of concern on this topic are Iran and North Korea.

 

1958: And then there’s the new Europe. On 1st January 1958 the treaty came into force establishing the European Economic Community (the EEC or Common Market). In June General de Gaulle became Prime Minister of France, and President later in the year, about the time he ordered the devaluation of the franc. Britain felt that entering the EEC would have too disturbing an effect on the economy and saved itself for possible membership application later on.

 

TODAY: As we know now, when those attempts were made, they proved utterly futile, as de Gaulle exercised his veto time and again to block Britain’s entry. This only became possible, on the third time of asking, after he had fallen from power in 1969. Towards the end of 2005, Britain has been chairman of the European Union for several months, during which period a new Constitution for it has been rejected in two referenda, and the seriously needed redesign of the Common Agricultural Policy is no further forward. By mid-2009 the revision of the EU Constitution depends partly on another referendum in Ireland. If the Constitution does achieve eventual ratification by all member states, the new post of European President will have been created, and Britain’s former Prime Minister Blair apparently fancies himself for the job. And yet, in spite of our keenness to get into the Common Market, we always seem to have been reluctant to make a complete and total commitment to it. You wouldn’t know this, but there’s now a Europe-wide currency called the Euro, absorbed by almost all the member states, but not by Britain. The other thing you’d find hard to believe is that, starting from the original six countries, there are now 25, including several from Eastern Europe. [By the time of online publication of this piece in 2016 Britain has voted to leave the EU]

 

I’ll mention something now that has shaken the establishment at all sorts of levels. The years 2007-2009 have seen unprecedented light shone on the massive salaries and bonuses enjoyed by the heads of large corporations, most especially the astronomical annual remuneration of senior bankers, many of whom bear direct responsibility for the recent near-collapse of the entire banking system. Salaries and pensions of several million pounds are not uncommon in these boardrooms. Can you imagine that?

 

1958: Hardly, but I can give you some comparisons from my year, which will seem ridiculous to you. New annual salaries were announced for senior board members of nationalised industries. The chairmen of London Transport and BEA were to receive £7,500 p.a. The Coal Board and Central Electricity Generating Board chairmen got £10,000, BOAC and Sugar Board chiefs £5,000 but the part-time chairmen of Cable and Wireless and the White Fish Authority got only £3,500. On a more parochial level, a seven-week London bus strike ended in June with a pay award increasing the weekly minimum wage for bus drivers from £9.13s.6d by 8s.6d. The minimum wage for agricultural workers was increased to £7.16s.0d.for a 47-hour week.

 

Away from all that, the New Year’s Honours awarded, among others, the DBE to the writer Rose Macaulay, and CBEs to Denis Compton, famous cricket player, Barbara Hepworth, sculptor, Louis MacNeice, poet and Alicia Markova, ballerina. In January there were major government resignations by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft, Enoch Powell and other junior Treasury ministers over ‘irreconcilable difference of opinion between the Chancellor and the rest of the Cabinet on financial and economic policy’. Apparently he wouldn’t agree to the expenditure estimate for the next year exceeding actual expenditure in the current financial year. The Queen’s Birthday Honours later included the CBE for actors Jack Hawkins and Celia Johnson, and playwright Terence Rattigan. 

 

TODAY: Some of us can certainly recall most of those names, and the Cabinet resignations particularly provide a powerful echo of today’s political life, as we’ve just experienced a batch of ministers leaving the Labour Government – and the Opposition, for that matter - over scandals involving considerable misuse of Parliamentary expenses. Some individuals were even claiming thousands of pounds to cover mortgages they had paid off long ago.

 

1958: I was just wondering whether anything came of the idea of a tunnel underneath the English Channel, because in my year the British chairman of the Channel Tunnel Study Group was appointed, in time to see the end of rationing and price control of fuel.

 

TODAY: Oh yes. The Tunnel was built and the Queen opened it with the French President for goods and passenger railway traffic in 1994. You can also put your car on a special train and get across the Channel in about half an hour. You can reach Brussels in two hours and it will also take you direct to Paris and Lille. I’m not sure that it has ever made any profit. What about other transport developments in your time?

 

1958: You should recall that the first parking meters appeared on London’s streets, yellow ‘No Parking’ lines were being painted on roads nationwide, and, in December, the eight-mile Preston bypass was opened as Britain’s first stretch of motorway. Driving even faster than permitted on such roads, Mike Hawthorn and Stirling Moss were the first UK world champion and runner up in Formula 1 motor racing. Work began on the Forth road bridge, to be the longest suspension bridge in Europe. In February members of the Manchester United football team were killed in the Munich air crash. Other aeroplanes were more successful. The first Boeing 747 service was inaugurated, the Douglas DC-8 was introduced, the McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom was unveiled, and BOAC announced the first transatlantic jet service using the Comet 4 aircraft. BEA announced a cheaper air fare for London-Manchester at £5 for a winter weekend return. A new form of transport, the Hovercraft, was introduced and Gatwick airport was opened in June, having cost £7 million.

 

TODAY: Well, 747 ‘Jumbos’ are still flying today, their latest version being the 777. I’ve recently seen a very early BOAC Comet at the Cosford Aeronautical Museum in Shropshire but those former nationalised airlines are gone now. We now have a single private company called British Airways along with numerous smaller ‘no frills’ airlines operating to European destinations very much more cheaply than the huge national carrier. And what about communications, things like telephone and television?

 

1958: As if there wasn’t enough tripe on television the State Opening of Parliament and the Queen’s Speech were televised for the first time. The BBC research laboratories also announced ‘a new method whereby television programmes could be recorded on magnetic tape’. It cost £85 per hour to run and needed 15,000 feet of tape to record a 15-minute TV programme.

 

TODAY: That may well explain why there is no trace of so many of the now historically interesting television programmes of fifty years ago. One thing that won’t really mean anything to you in your time is the electronic revolution. Once, long ago, we imagined that computers were just machines for making big calculations extremely fast. Now they are at the heart of person-to-person communication worldwide. The cost of using the telephone has tumbled and the mobile phone, a little gadget you can carry around in your pocket, comes in models that will do almost anything except make the toast.

 

1958: All that sort of thing was only to be seen here in futuristic strip cartoons. At least, this was the year when you could telephone someone else in this country without involving the operator, using the new subscriber trunk dialling system (STD). Calling abroad was still a nuisance – you needed to book some very long-distance calls 24 hours ahead, for example to America or Australia, and be charged £1 per minute for a minimum of three minutes – and no guarantee of being able to hear particularly well.

 

TODAY: Ah, you can dial those countries direct now. The reception quality is generally excellent and you can talk for three quarters of an hour for £3, probably less with some services. As for television, the digital and satellite television have enlarged their footprint right across the country by 2009, providing a bewildering and increasing number and variety of channels to choose from, very few of which seem to contain anything that most people would want to see. As you say, plenty of tripe, but we have far more of it than you could ever have envisaged. In fact, we now look back to the 1960s as the Golden Age of high quality television.

 

1958: Moving to live entertainment, you may remember that Britain’s official censor, the Lord Chamberlain, lifted the ban on the portrayal of homosexuality on the stage in 1958.

 

TODAY: I do, though it didn’t prevent a few busybodies from interfering with freedom of expression, trying to get stage plays banned which they had neither seen nor read. Still, it would only be a few years before his role would be abolished completely. And what else in the arts, entertainment and lighter matters?

 

1958: John Betjeman’s Collected Poems were published and had enormous readership appeal. So did JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society –

 

TODAY: Just a quick word on Galbraith. At time of writing, he is still alive and still wise, aged 97. He said only the other day that if there had been no such thing as ‘corporate America’, the overwhelming concentration of big business power with the government in its pocket, the US would not have gone into Iraq in 2003, and it would not have had George W Bush as President. But you are fortunate to have escaped the ludicrous and destructive eight years of his terms of office and of the apparently blind loyalty paid him by our own Prime Minister.

 

1958: Back to the arts in my time. Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago was published, becoming the most popular book of the year. The citation for his Nobel Prize referred to ‘his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition’. He accepted the prize but the USSR government then ordered him to decline it. I do know he died two years later in 1960. While on this year’s Nobel Prizes, the Chemistry one went to a Cambridge scientist Frederick Sawyer for his work on protein structures, especially that of insulin.

 

Other notable books published include Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, later filmed with Audrey Hepburn, Leon Uris’s Exodus, filmed with Paul Newman among others, and Masters of Deceit by J Edgar Hoover, Head of the CIA. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, filmed with the superb Shelley Winters and James Mason, caused scandal for its portrayal of an adult man’s sexual attraction to a precocious and seriously under-age girl. PH Newby, Controller of the BBC Radio Third Programme, won the first Booker Prize.

 

TODAY: Yes, and that at a time when hardly anyone even knew the prize had been created. The ceremony probably took place over a small dinner table somewhere completely away from public and media gaze, and received a couple of lines in the newspaper the following day. I met Newby myself briefly many years later and can imagine him being profoundly uncomfortable at taking part in today’s televised Booker shenanigans.

 

1958: Moving on, the year’s most popular films included 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' with Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, and Burl Ives as ‘Big Daddy’, 'Bridge on the River Kwai' with Alec Guinness and many well-known British actor faces, and the musicals 'Gigi' (Best Film and Best Director in the Academy Awards) and South Pacific. Elvis Presley, aka ‘The King’, whom some believed to be still alive some time after his death, The Platters, the Everley Brothers and Domenico Modugno (whose ‘Volare’ was Grammy Record of the Year) were all very high in the Top Ten at various times during the year. One Sheb Wooley (wasn’t it actually Barry Cryer?) had a hit with a song called ‘The Purple People Eater’ concerning either an eater of purple people, or a people eater who was coloured purple. The Grammies, which don’t necessarily follow the Top Ten, awarded Male Vocalist of the Year to Perry Como for ‘Catch a Falling Star’ and Female Vocalist to Ella Fitzgerald for ‘The Irving Berlin Songbook’.

 

TODAY: Few of those will be remembered today, though they mostly still ring a bell with me. On the other hand, those huge troubling issues in international affairs, whose potential solutions are so continually bedevilled by conflicting motivations and vested interests, seem fated to remain with us, unresolved, until the ends of our lives and well beyond.

 

1958: True, but there’s an event from my time we need to mention that affected you personally, though not for very long. I’m sure you’ll recall that 1958 was the year when they were finally winding down military National Service. You were almost one of The Last.

 

TODAY: Indeed I was. We might call it another pivotal moment in my life. Why not? As I’d moved through 1957 towards my nineteenth birthday, so the moment approached for registering to spend the next two years in one of the Armed Forces. You could choose to have your service deferred if you had a university place. I didn’t have one. It was your responsibility to find out when you should register and for actually doing so. I frequently went past the Drill Hall in Stafford and kept an eye on the posters outside it as well as looking for the momentous notice in the local newspaper. There was going to be only one more call-up after mine, and the whole process had already slowed down considerably. Even so, the word on the street was that if you passed the medical, you were in.

 

My registration date arrived and I was eventually summoned to the medical examination in London. This would have been during the autumn when I was working on the farm. I can recall going into a large building in one of the Bloomsbury squares, presumably some offices of the War Office, only later called ‘Ministry of Defence’. I was one of dozens of young blokes, putting our clothes in a crude cubicle and parading down this long, cold hall in our underpants to line up and be inspected. I remember being asked to cough and presume a stethoscope was applied at some point to check if we were living or dead. My ears were looked into, my teeth briefly examined and my eyes tested. Why you needed to be virtually naked for those aspects of it I never discovered.

 

Dressed again, we did some intelligence tests in logical thinking and basic maths and literacy. The next thing I remember is, following a conversation with someone from the Army, going on to talk to an RAF man. Given my ‘A’ level French and Latin results, he suggested that the RAF would put me down for a special station in Scotland where they taught you Russian so that you could listen in on Russian radio traffic for them. This was serious Cold War stuff and sounded to me like one of the least annoying ways of doing your National Service. I was resigned to this and it became simply a matter of waiting to be called up. When I began work in London I expected that within a few months I would be lifted out of it, put into uniform and sent to Scotland.

 

Except that it didn’t happen like that. Shortly after moving to London, I was invited to Paddington General Hospital, Harrow Road for a ‘Supplementary Eye Examination’. Inside the usual optician’s darkened consulting room there, the man asked me to take off my glasses and cover my good eye with my hand. He turned off the light and turned on the thing that shows you letters like Q, A, K, M, U, and so on, getting smaller as they go down the board. ‘What can you see?’ ‘Nothing really’, I replied, ’it’s all very blurred.’ ‘Thanks very much, that’s all.’ And I was out on the street again.

 

A few weeks later I received my National Service Medical Grade Card. They only took you in if you were Grades I or II. They’d given me Grade IV, meaning that they didn’t want me at all. Apparently my short-sighted left eye had made me physically unsuited for going to Scotland to learn Russian, or to do anything else in the Armed Forces. The instructions told you to keep this Card safe and with you at all times. Presumably a policeman could pounce on you out of the blue if you looked as though you were of National Service age and ask you what your little game was. In that way, my military career was dissolved before it had even begun, and I continued my training with the Inland Revenue – though not for very long.

 

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LAST WORD And so another key event completely outside my control had come

and gone, making, as it passed, another crucial decision about the future direction

of my life. Recalling it now completes a narrative circle, connecting me from today,

through these recollections, with the pivotal year 1958 when the whole of the rest

of my life began.

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