1965

 

 

I’m inspired to write this post after reading the book by Christopher Bray with the title 1965. Bray regards 1965 as pivotal in the making of modern Britain. As he points out it is the midpoint not only of the calendar sixties but the historians long decade from 1956 and the Suez crisis until 1973, the Yom Kippur war and the oil price shock.

Bray strays well outside 1965 to consider events particularly in the early sixties and he views the year by some moderately famous artists. Incidentally Bray is very opinionated as when he devotes a chapter to a rant against the Beeching railway cuts

I was attracted to the book partly because its contribution to modern history but also because 1965 was a year of great personal change for me. I left University, started work and got married.. As Bray points out unemployment was almost ridiculously low at 1.5%. As a science graduate I had a range of possibilities. I considered doing an MSc in Analysis at the then Battersea College in London, a job with the scientific instruments industry body near London and a job with Unilever at Port Sunlight near Birkenhead. I had applied unsuccessfully to the Atomic Energy authority mainly because everyone else did and they seemed to be hoovering up so many new graduates.

It sounds trivial now but I rejected London because it meant I would have to sell my car.  I had become the proud owner of an old Morris 1000 van. This was a well used example of a moderately up to date vehicle which amazingly stayed in production into the seventies. A car of any sort was becoming much more common. The equally trivial reason for rejecting scientific instruments was the training course they proposed.

My future mother-in-law was infuriated by my job searching. Getting married with no job and no home she grumbled. Looking back she was right and I was confident to the point of being rather blasé. We ( or rather Annette) had the not unusual squabbles over the wedding with her mother. Her mother had firmly vetoed the idea of making the dress herself even though Annette was a highly qualified textile designer. It happened that during a visit to London we saw a dress on sale which Annette bought there and then. I have sometimes thought since that mother-in-law, parent of just one girl  (and four boys ) would have enjoyed wedding shopping with her daughter.

Bray makes much of some the artistic figures of the time. I would have considered myself well informed but I doubt I had heard of Sylvia Plath and had only a very hazy idea of R D Laing. In contrast I was very aware of the spy genre writing. My college friend was very impressed by James Bond but the matter of fact agent of the Ipcress File was a revelation. The cold war rumbled on but had become a backdrop. A great number of pseudo intellectuals espoused, if not communism, then its avowed philosophy. The fact that the philosophy was not followed in Soviet Russia escaped all the fashionable Marxists.

Through my time at university there had been a striking change in male dress. When I started I wore a tie and washed my drip dry shirts leaving them to hang in the dedicated area in our block. Gradually this semi formality ceased and by the end I was wearing dark casual shirts with a pullover instead of a jacket. This was like almost all of my fellow students.

For my final year I lived in the bedsitter that I occupied in my industrial year. By then Annette was in lodgings nearby and although I couldn’t visit her she could freely visit me. This was part of the rather bizarre double standards in boy/girl relationships. Although the cooking facilities were sparse with two gas rings she could prepare our meals with a little forward planning. We lacked the money to eat out although we still frequented coffee bars.

I enjoyed living independently so much that in the summer of 1965 between finishing University and starting a new working life and marriage we both took temporary jobs at a book wholesaler.

Bray cites the “Avengers” TV series extensively for turning to surrealist plots and backgrounds after a mundane beginning. It certainly didn’t hurt having glamorous Emma Peel with her dizzy fashion sense as lead character. He sees this as the mainstream TV equivalent of the LSD fantasies of the super trendy. All this was happening in London and I did not see any evidence whatsoever of drug culture in the provinces. The drug of choice where I lived was alcohol and there was some over indulgence. On the whole in my university of technology there was rather a determination to enter the jobs market at a higher level. Recreational subjects were ignored except for token general studies. Because excellent facilities were shared with the adjacent teacher training college who specialised in future games and PE teachers there was a great emphasis on sports. While girls were not specifically excluded rather few chose science and technology.  My course entry of about 60 contained only two girls.

While I didn’t want to live in London we visited quite a bit. Britain is very London-centric and so much of culture seemed centred there. This was mainly 1965 and onwards when we had a bit of money to spend. Annette had a college friend living in London and we visited her a couple of times.

As Bray acknowledges there is no doubt that the music of the year was by the Beatles. In Help, the film and album there was a debt to the surrealists. In the album Rubber Soul there was a musical sophistication that pointed the way towards their later evolution. Both established their amazing popularity.

It is hard now to summarise the year. Perhaps best described as change coupled with liberation. A great mixture of ideas, some well rooted, some recent, established a feeling of excitement and fluidity. While this led on to the fatuous hippies and yippies of the later sixties I grew increasingly against the whole lifestyle. I was concerned with establishing my career and our home as we bought our first house in 1968. While my environment was liberal it wasn’t permissive.

One side benefit for me was that the working class became trendy or perhaps more precisely the flat classless speech exemplified by Michael Caine playing Harry Palmer in the Ipcress file. I aspired to this but I’ve never quite got rid of a slight “Brummie” twang. At any rate regional accents became much more acceptable and Southern or BBC English voices ceased to be the only possibility short of an upper class bray. Ironically speech was one of my abilities affected by my stroke. For a while I was slow and robotic so I am content with with the current which is pretty close to the original.