It was in 1955 that Pete Seegar first asked ' Where have all the flowers gone? ' It took twelve years of searching to produce the answer; most of them were in San Francisco, many of them entangled in the hair of the twenty something generation. This was in an age before pop festivals became the expensive preserve of the middle aged, middle class and middle bellied community. I noticed in 1969 it had become fashionable to make a sign of peace with one's right hand while saying, with obvious and meaningful pleasure ' Three days '. I thought I should adopt the habit myself, although not confident it would be appreciated in the rarefied atmosphere of an all male prep school common room, where most colleagues had been alive during the First World War and had fought in the Second. No-one ever asked me the meaning of the gesture, which was just as well as only later did I discover that it was a reference to the Woodstock [ USA not Oxfordshire ] Festival, enjoyed by 400,000 in 1969.
But were the 60s special and were they any more 'swinging' than any other twentieth century decade? After all, a good deal of stuff went on in the 1950s. As Empire morphed into Commonwealth, colonialism was painfully reversed. We all know that there had been a 'scramble' for Africa in the 19th century but restoring your pan of yellow goo to something like its original ovular state was not an easy task as the Mau Mau risings in Kenya demonstrated all too poignantly. There was trouble up north, in Egypt and Algeria, too while the Korean War gave us a taste of problems ahead in the not so gentle collapse of Indo-China. The Common Market [ now there's a novel concept ] opened for business in 1957; there was considerable friction between the Warsaw Pact and NATO; Stalin died but it didn't make much difference to the rest of the world.
By the end of the 1950s Britain was well on the way to becoming a car owning and television watching society. You could switch on and enjoy the manifestations of post-war prosperity at the seaside: Mods and Rockers; Brylcreem; itsy witsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikinis etc, while you hummed ' Fings ain't what they used to be ', lamenting the advent of parking meters and bowling alleys. Tony Hancock and Spike Milligan gave a contemporarily acidic feel to humour; film idols James Dean and Marilyn Monroe showed it was a young person's world in the cinema before they succumbed prematurely, reminding us that ' only the good die young '.The meaningless froth of Salad Days and the happy go lucky philosophy of ' Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be 'encouraged us to believe that peace and prosperity really were becoming permanent features. The brash Bill Haley, the gyrating King Elvis and the slightly more subtle Buddy Holly [ currently undergoing a revival -- hooray! ] were evidence that the 1950s certainly had rock and roll but was that sufficient to define their age?
The Fifties persona said ' Heed,
Rock 'n Roll is all that you need.
The Sixties reply:
' Sex please and that's why
You can't tell your grass from your weed '.
One could argue that the 60s brought those 50s seeds of hope to fruition. We may have been encouraged by the Prime Minister telling us ' You've never had it so good ' but perhaps we didn't quite believe it until we walked down Carnaby Street in all its glory, celebrating the winning of the World Cup. In the late 1950s I waited each week eagerly for the Eagle comic to appear with Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, locked in a death struggle with the Mekon, a very strange looking creature which David Attenborough has probably by now found on the seabed somewhere. Ten years later in 1969 humankind was actually walking on the moon. The limited Korean war gave way to the horrific conflict that was Vietnam; general tension rose ever more acutely in the Cuban missile crisis; the great sleeping giant that was the People's Republic of China woke up and began to explode nuclear devices but the Western powers looked away and continued to recognise the exiled Nationalist government on Formosa instead. The dream [ a horrendous nightmare for Victorian diehards ] of a more liberal society suddenly became a reality. In GB we stopped hanging people; we allowed women to take the contraceptive pill and to have abortions; homosexuality became legal; and pubs opened on Sundays [ except in Wales ]. We could scarcely believe it.
Thus was British destiny established for the next fifty years. On the stage we didn't just ' remind you to remind me; we said we wouldn't look back '; we were not afraid to look back in undiluted anger, while building theatres at the same time. The National took a little while to find its home and its identity but the Chichester Festival Theatre opened in 1962. A year later I watched in awe as Joan Plowright gave the definitive performance of St Joan [ why don't we do Shaw's plays any more? ]. The following year I saw her husband, Laurence Olivier, portray a mesmerising Othello. Even now, fifty four years later, I can see him so clearly striding the stage having dispatched Desdemona.
Then there were the Beatles and were they special? Were they a class apart? Their secret lay in not only being ahead of the game but in being simultaneously supreme practitioners in all branches of popular music -- in lyrics, in composition, in musicality and in recording technique [ this last with a little help from their friends ]. As we focus on 1968 as the year which both defined the 1960s and set the trend and the pace for the next fifty years [ although 1979 might disagree ], it is worth noting that the two most popular songs in that year were the reassuring ' What a Wonderful World ' by Louis Armstrong and the slightly more challenging encouragement to improve your situation in ' Hey Jude '. Films of that year looked backwards, Where Eagles Dare ; sideways, Bullitt [ with Steve McQueen doing his own stunt driving in the most brilliant of car chases ]; forwards Barbarella ; but the most popular of all was 'Yellow Submarine. Sometimes a taste of superficial silliness is good for the soul.
In this year of 1968 Pope Paul VI tried in vain to recover lost ground by banning the contraceptive pill, while others were rolling back the boundaries of medicine as an epidural was used for the first time and Christian Barnard, a South African specialist, did something quite remarkable in the Groote Schurr [ pronounced Grochoor ] Hospital in Capetown when he carried out the first successful heart transplant operation on Philip Blaiberg. Private Eye, well into its sardonic stride by now, celebrated the happy event on record with a ditty to the tune of the well known hymn ' Onward Christian soldiers '
Onward Christian Barnard,
Marching through Groote Schurr
With the heart of Blaiberg
In the bottom drawer.
Thus, as gender testing was used for the first time at the Winter Olympics in Grenoble, a new chapter in medical history began.
A strange new instant food item, a Macdonald, made its UK debut; sport was on the move as professionals played at Wimbledon for the first time; the Boeing 747 made its first commercial flight; and a computer mouse crept out from somewhere, announcing something rather significant to a pre-electronic world. Someone had the bright idea of introducing First and Second Class mail, while high above us Apollo 7 made the first manned orbit of the earth. Apollo 6 had previously circumvented the planet but only with tortoises on board. No-one seemed to know how this species had made it through the selection process.
So much there was in 1968 that at least presaged and in many cases set the trend for what was to come. It was a significant year for race relations and in this context, fifty years on, progress has been mixed. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King in March, the ' I am a man ' movement gathered pace in America and the Olympic 200 metre champion, Tommy Smith, gave a black glove fisted salute as his national anthem was played. Sidney Poitier starred in the classic film Guess who's coming to dinner, tackling racial tensions from a white liberal standpoint. Fifty years later black people still seem to die at the hands of the police [ eg Charlottesville ] and sports people are kneeling rather than standing for the national anthem. Despite the shocking number of stabbing incidents involving young black people in the UK, perhaps we have made some solid progress. After all, in 1968 Enoch Powell was just getting going with his Rivers of Blood speech and to a large extent we seemed to migrate from that irresponsibly incendiary language to the more prosaic but no less sincere words and spirit of the Race Relations Act of that year, making it illegal to refuse housing, employment or public service on the grounds of race. I never really understood discrimination as my childhood heroes had been the likes of cricketer Garry Sobers and athlete Kip Keino so those with black skin were almost in the ranks of the deity for me. Today, fifty years on, the degree of personal tolerance and appreciation of difference have made remarkable progress but there is always work to be done as the potential malign influence is forever present.
We should not move on without mentioning another area of strife, Northern Ireland. Someone once said that modern times began when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800 AD. I can't be sure of that as I wasn't there but I can make a good stab at when the ' troubles ' in Ulster began, although problems had never been far absent since independence was granted to the Irish Free State in 1920. On 5th October 1968 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, campaigning against ' discrimination in housing against the nationalist and catholic population ', persisted in holding a march, despite a ban, in Duke Street, Londonderry. What ensued was not pretty and heaven knows where one's sympathies should lie but there was much use of baton and water cannon and many demonstrators were injured. Although there was no individual human fatality, the events were filmed for posterity and the possibility of a peaceful resolution evaporated on that day.
As 1969 got underway, I remember stepping off the ferry at Larne in a state of innocent ignorance about political developments in order to hitch a lift along the county Down coast road. I had not gone far before a police officer warned me that this particular practice was now less than prudent. So a degree of darkness spread over that beautiful land for about forty years, although for a majority of people life continued in a routine and peaceful way. I continued to travel there, to the land of my father, to see friends and enjoy marvellous holidays and, outside certain hot spots, was largely unaware of the challenges facing certain sections of the population.
Elsewhere 1968 was proving to be no less seminal. Ask anyone who recalls anything about the Vietnam War to name one event in it and most will mention the Mee Lai massacre on 16 March which became something of a turning point in American involvement and set the scene for public opinion on overseas involvement for the next two generations. Meanwhile, in the fiftieth year since the Russian Revolution, Czechoslovakia rose in revolt, not so differently from Hungary's attempt twelve years earlier. Riots were put down with a vengeance and things seemed to be restored to their previous state but perhaps the seed of dissent had taken strong root and would continue to grow discreetly until the shaking off of the communist yoke twenty years later. But was the social life based on the capitalism of the western world to do any better? Robert Kennedy was assassinated on 6 June and in August the Democratic Convention in Chicago descended into the abyss of violent demonstration and an even more brutal imposition of the rule of law of which the Soviet authorities would have been proud.
All of this happened in 1968 and paved the way for global and domestic developments for succeeding decades. To many, however, 1968 was the year of student unrest, especially in Europe, spilling over into demonstrations, rioting and systemic violence. We recall the leaders' names -- Danny, Andreas, Ulrike and Rudi, known further in case you're struggling as Cohn Bendit, Baader, Meinhof and Dutschke. These young revolutionaries caused much mayhem and earned notoriety rather than respect.
We were a little more circumspect in the UK. The intellectual Tariq Ali preferred the pen to the sword, while our chief revolutionary was young Peter -- do you remember him? -- Hain who was nobly engaged in stopping a cricket tour rather than bringing down the established order. He, a South African by birth and culture, was determined that a cricket tour by his own country, where apartheid had a firm hold on sport, should not take place. His means were direct but controlled and where his continental colleagues foundered, Hain had total success. As a cricket enthusiast, I was indebted to him as the South African tourists were replaced by a Rest of the World team, which included, somewhat ironically, the best South Africans in any case. On 14 August 1970 at the Kennington Oval, in two hours after tea on the second day, I witnessed the most sublime batting partnership between two of the best left-handed batsmen the world has known. Graeme Pollock [South Africa] with exquisite timing and elegance and Garry Sobers [ West Indies and certainly deserving of a second mention in this blog ], in a spirit of unalloyed and disdainful aggression, put on 165 runs in less than two hours. Thank you, Mr Hain.
Cultures clashed; an indulgent, libertarian lifestyle on the one hand and a touch of the altruistic Robin Hood on the other -- doing well by doing good as Tom Lehrer said about a different activity. The spirit of Ulrike Meinhof ' Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more ' shone through Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If, where we saw revolution through the prism of an old fashioned public school and again it is not a pretty sight. The character Mick Travis, characteristically swigging vodka, warms to his theme of how ' one man can change the world with a bullet in the right place. ' It was -- and remains -- a memorable film but one aspect caused difficulties for me in years to come when I was running a boarding school. After a rebellious CCF Field Day the Headmaster, played so emphatically by Lionel Jeffries, opens a large drawer in his study to reveal the sublimely peaceful corpse of the Chaplain who has been killed on the military exercise. Whenever, and it was not too frequently, I had a really difficult conversation with one of the Chaplains who worked at Gordonstoun, I began to imagine his body being in a drawer close by, with my having to introduce him to visitors in that rather zany position.
While students rioted with varying degrees of venom and violence in France, Japan, Senegal, Columbia and a host of others, things were a little more sedate at Oxford University where I found myself for an ingloriously brief career. The left-wing committee of the Balliol College Junior Common Room decided that funds should be allocated to support our fellow students engaged in a serious sit-in at the London School of Economics. A meeting was called and, with monumental filibustering, it dragged on for ten hours, four of which were spent debating that ' The Chapel bell shall not be rung for religious purposes '. Late in the evening and with only a caucus of the hardliners remaining, the money was approved but, I seem to remember, it was never paid, an ancient, long lost statute being brought into play on the side of reason.
Things hotted up a little elsewhere in Oxford, particularly at All Souls' College, seen as a hotbed of privilege [ very well endowed and no undergraduate students ] and it was picketed by the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students. The Head of the College, known as the Warden, was John Sparrow so, above the milling throng, ten deep on the pavement, were some choice pieces of graffiti including ' Sparrow is a Great Tit '. I mingled with the demonstrators for a while before returning to Balliol College to discuss with a friend, William Elland, the dangers posed to the wine cellars at All souls', reputed to be the finest in the university. We wrote to warden Sparrow offering assistance, should it be needed, to keep the marauding hordes away from the treasured elixir of life. We were amazed to receive a reply, now proudly nestling in the All Souls' archives. It reads as follows:
Dear Mr Pyper
I write to thank you and Mt Elland for your kind and encouraging letter. I am sure that the sentiments you express are shared by a large majority of the University, both senior and junior members.
I think we shall withstand the puny efforts of the infantile " revolutionary " students without outside assistance but I am truly grateful for your sympathetic offer. If need be, we will call upon you to guard the cellars, which you rightly recognise as the arsenals of learning.
Yours sincerely
John Sparrow.
Seriously, I was delighted to get your letter.
So a rather eventful year was drawing to a close and what, you might ask, from Mee Lai to Memphis, from Chicago to Czechoslovakia, was my abiding image of 1968. I do not hesitate; without doubt it was Bob Beamon winning Olympic Long Jump Gold Medal with a jump of 8.90 metres. That record had nudged forward by 22 centimetres in 33 years; he broke it by 55 centimetres in one jump. He seemed to take off and he landed beyond the point where the jump could be measured with the specialised equipment of the day. Yes, it was in the rarefied atmosphere of Mexico City but in the ensuing fifty years only one person on one occasion has bettered it. It was something of a leap in the light and a breathtaking reflection of a special and significant year.
30th November 2018
