The Europeans in Bradford c.1958

Hah! Helvetica again I see, on the right… 1969, a Methuen Modern Play (great series). I'm getting more and more allergic to that typeface. I've just noticed after 40 years (or however many) that it’s what the National Theatre uses and must be part of the reason I feel so little love for that institution. But more of that another time – the National Theatre has nothing to do with my experience of those plays.

I never saw The Fire Raisers but have had the book around since I bought it for, apparently, ‘7s. 6d. (37½ p)’ and have just re-read it in a brief orgy of returns to plays that I saw and read years ago and still have copies of. From Penguin Plays, Three European Plays, 1958 (2/6) I've read Ring Round the Moon by Jean Anouilh and The Queen and the Rebels by Ugo Betti. I skipped Sartre’s In Camera (Huis Clos) because I've kept going back to him in the intervening years. Then onto Max Frisch, The Fire Raisers.

The Anouilh and the Betti I saw (certainly the former) at the Bradford Civic Playhouse when I was still at school; probably the Sartre as well and some Giroudoux. ‘Playhouse’, note, not ‘Theatre’ which I've been calling it in earlier postings: I just thought of looking to see if they have a website. Not only do they and it gives me the right name but it has lists of productions from 1947; only for certain years, though, unfortunately, and not the ones I’d like to look at. (I also gather the theatre has been through vicissitudes over the years, is currently ‘The Priestley’ and is in administration pending relaunch as the Bradford Playhouse. Good luck to them.)

The productions were amateur and I suppose crude but had a powerful effect on me as a teenager who had no other experience of theatre. The way the lighting created dawn through the French windows over some desultory party-goers too exhausted to get themselves to bed or through the bars of a prison cell in some desperate central European police state was magical. And the plays, even when lightweight (Anouilh) were elegant, intelligent and interesting. They made the Continent seem so much more exciting than the tatty and tacky Britain of the 50s – a point confirmed by the stuff I've been reading about that period: Colin MacInnes [check MacInnes label in the right hand margin] and now Kenneth Allsop’s The Angry Decade (free from Amazon, virtually, apart from £3 postage – and thrown out by Leeds University, I note. Right.)

About The Fire Raisers, first produced in Zurich in 1958 and at the Royal Court, London, in 1961:

The fire raisers are a secret group who go around the town starting fires. A couple of them move in on a bourgeois family and made no secret of the fact that that’s what they are but the businessman father (Biedermann) finds it more comfortable to convince himself they’re joking as they fill his loft with drums of petrol and ask him for matches. It’s stylish and funny as well as sinister. I especially like the Greek chorus of firemen:

CHORUS
Ready are we,
Carefully coiled are the hoses,
In accordance with the regulations,
Polished and carefully greased and of brass
Is each windlass.
Everyone knows what his task is.

CHORUS LEADER
An ill wind is blowing –

CHORUS
Everyone knows what his task is,
Polished and carefully tested,
To make sure that we have full pressure,
And likewise of brass is our pump.

CHORUS LEADER
And the hydrants?

CHORUS
Ready are we….

And here’s a sample couple of pages – wonderful stuff, and quite unlike anything being done in the Britain of the ineffectual Angry Young Men and the prosaic Kitchen Sink (click to enlarge):

Absolute Beginners

I've mentioned that with colleagues I'm researching English teaching in London secondary schools from the end of the war to the mid-1960s. In that connection I've just been re-reading Colin MacInnes's 1959 cult novel Absolute Beginners. (England, Half English, above, is essays, but the cover would have suited the novel too. The picture's by Pat Fogarty.)

I can see why it was a cult novel and it still appeals on the third reading (the first having been, I suppose, soon after it came out). It's about the London scene in 1958 and culminates in the Notting Hill Riots. The narrator is 18 (19 at the end) and, very consciously and assertively, a teenager – a species of which he speaks as its would-be philosopher. The book is sharp on the social types and scenes he moves between, and lyrical on the fabric and feel of the city, its neighbourhoods and populations.

I went back to the book wondering how far the moods and attitudes it depicts would have been those of a proportion of the pupils in 'our' London schools and come up against a problem of plausibility. Not only is this a novel, it's a novel about an 18-year-old young man's expression of his distinctive, consciously adopted teenage identity written by a 45-year-old whose own youth was spent in an Australian public school and then, from age 16, in various employments in Europe.

Of course, in the late '50s MacInnes knew his London youth in so far as a middle-aged man could who hung out with those of them who went to certain coffee places, bars etc, and who had sex with not a few of the boys. (I know this from, amongst other sources, Tony Gould's biography, Inside Outsider.)

But it's clear that no-one who at 18 had been that working class kid with a useless 'elementary school' education (it must have been secondary modern) and coming from the childhood that's depicted could have either arrived at such clear and definite views on such a range of current issues, or articulated his views with such eloquence. The attitudes expressed are blatantly those of a liberal Guardian reader: extremely articulate about politics (despite despising the Parliamentary game), anti-capital punishment, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic (though less obviously anti-sexist). And above all he's already, at nearly 19, got everything worked out to the point of an announceable 'position'.

MacInnes has in fact written his idea of the ideal Teenage Manifesto as he wishes some teenager had written it but none actually did, and of course his wishes are those of a 45-year-old who had never been that sort of youth. Whether any 1958 teenager really was so insightful and certain is of course a matter for inquiry. The evidence would be diaries, letters or recordings from the time, and if any exist I'd love to know of them.

I looked at Tony Gould again and was surprised that he has nothing to say about the sheer implausibility of this character, nor about his strange style. It's impossible to believe, for instance, that the following was the subcultural style of any actual group of British youth; it's the dialogue from the first couple of pages:


IT WAS with the advent of the Laurie London era that I realized the whole teenage epic was tottering to doom.
'Fourteen years old, that absolute beginner,' I said to the Wizard as we paused casually in the gramophone section to hear Little Laurie in that golden disc performance of his.
'From now on,' said Wizard, 'he's certainly Got The Whole World In His Hands.'
We listened to the wonder boy's nostrils spinning on.
'They buy us younger every year,' I cried. 'Why, Little Mr L.'s voice hasn't even dropped yet, so who will those tax-payers try to kidnap next?
'Sucklings,' said Wizard. ….

The Wiz looked wise, like the middle feller of the three old monkeys.
'It's not the tax-payers,' he said, 'who are responsible. Ifs the kids themselves, for buying the EPs these elderly sordids bribe the teenage nightingales to wax.'
'No doubt,' I said, for I know better than ever to argue with the Wizard, or with anyone else who gets his kicks from an idea.
Mr Wiz continued, masticating his salmon sandwich for anyone to see, 'It's been a two-way twist, this teenage party. Exploitation of the kiddos by the conscripts, and exploitation of themselves by the crafty little absolute beginners. The net result? "Teenager"'s become a dirty word or, at any rate, a square one.'
I smiled at Mr W. 'Well, take it easy, son,' I said, 'because a sixteen year old sperm like you has got a lot of teenage living still to do. As for me, eighteen summers, rising nineteen, I'll very soon be out there among the oldies.'
The Wizard eyed me with his Somerset Maugham appearance. 'Me, boy,' he said, 'I tell you. As things are, I won't regret it when the teenage label's torn off the arse pockets of my drip-dry sky-blue jeans.'

I find it easier to believe in the argot of Alex and his Droogies in A Clockwork Orange.

Gould doesn't cite any serious critical accounts of Absolute Beginners except one, by Richard Wollheim in 1962, that I'm hoping to dig out from the library stack tomorrow. There must be lots of others but I haven't got round to hunting them out. But in any case, my interest at the moment is more sociological than literary: is this novel a fair, if over-articulate, representation of the attitudes of an influential section of London teenagers in 1958-9?

The curse of the public schools

The British Academy (posh Regency house above St James’s Park) has brilliant lectures, discussion panels and conferences, all free, on academic topics that are of wide interest. I've attended great events on Vietnam, empires, directions in anthropology, the politics of the Middle East, neuroscience and understanding human evolution and Byron. All the top people in the relevant discipline turn up, such is the distinction of the speakers; the audience is full of white-haired men and women as sharp as nails with sticks and helpers, as well as bright postgraduates and professors from all over the country and key people from quangos, the Science Museum, the Army etc. etc. It’s all so unlike the third-rate world of education in the quality of the proceedings and it’s salutary once in a while to watch the real disciplines doing their stuff at full power. The British Academy, moreover, seems to be one of the few public spaces totally free of New Labour bollocks (which the speakers invariably have a go at at every opportunity) – no targets or accountability or key skills, just scholarship, knowledge and speculation.

Last night was the historians Peter Hennessy and Ross McKibbin on ‘The Fifties: Conflict or Consensus?’. It was really about post-war politics, when there really was a consensus between the mainstream of the parties (NHS, nationalisation of Bank of England, coal and railways, Cold War) up to when it ended – date disputed but probably the early 70s. Then we had twenty years of savage conflict (‘Margaret vs Arthur’ as Hennessy put it – i.e. Thatcher/Scargill), with present Cabinet members (then in their twenties) saying crazy lefty things at conferences; and now we have a consensus again, at the core of which is the doctrine that 40% of national income, plus or minus 2%, is the amount that will be spent on public purposes.

One interesting fact, that came out almost incidentally: during the war Churchill and other intelligent Tories had come to take it for granted that the public schools had had their day and couldn’t survive. It would have been easy to include their abolition in the 1944 Education Act. In fact not a single Labour MP (so Ross McKibbin – I think -- said) voted for the amendment to that effect – sadly, there wasn’t time to hear why not.

It was a huge failure. The price paid for retaining the private sector in education – this is a point that’s obviously true but that I'd never realised until McKibbin briefly stated it, right at the end of the session – was that comprehensive schools were thereby ruled out for many years: if the aristocracy were allowed to retain their privileged education with all the access it afforded, it was not politically feasible to deny the middle class their own privileged route, the grammar schools. So we were stuck with the grammar schools, which has meant in London that we’ve never, as I understand it, had a true comprehensive school, even leaving the private sector out of account.

One more interesting fact (out of very many): in 1946 more boys leaving grammar schools entered engineering than any other profession.