I’ve heard and read a great deal of stuff about “The Sixties”, and the more I hear the more I think that they are talking about either some mythology or the private experience of a small group to which I did not belong. I know the old joke which says that if you can remember The Sixties you weren’t really there. Perhaps that applies to me. Perhaps not. I remember the decade, and remember it well too.
The event that has got me going today has been the “Diary” column in the London Review of Books. The author on this occasion is the journalist Jeremy Harding, who was reviewing the usual constituent elements of the canonical account of the decade …. the “events” in Paris and other capital cities, the radical journalism of Oz and the International Times in this country, Timothy Leary advocating “tuning in, turning on and dropping out”, and the emergence of the SDS in America, and all the rest of it. Certainly the mythological version of the decade has grown up around a core of actuality, like the mud that used to cling to one of those old real leather footballs. There is probably a core of truth at the heart of the hype. If it really was like that, however, how come I missed out on most of it?
I was involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament throughout the decade, and I did join some demonstrations, including some that involved civil disobedience.* I don’t recall any of the high tension and drama of Harding’s account. Only one person of whom I was aware regularly smoked dope. The closest I came to real political radicalism was to be a colleague for several years of Cliff Slaughter, one of the leading lights of the Socialist Workers’ Party. He was a rather effective slow left-arm spin bowler at cricket, which does not sound terribly revolutionary. (Ouch! Sorry about the pun!) It wasn’t quite Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone Days, but life was fairly tranquil, on the whole.
Perhaps the absence of real fervour and upheaval in the part of the provincial Britain I inhabited is illustrated by an account of a student sit-in at the University of Bradford, at which I was working. A small group of students occupied the main administrative corridor of the university. The Vice-Chancellor (Principal, if you’re in the USA) Ted Edwards, invited the leaders around for a cup of coffee and asked what it was that they wanted. They demanded student representation on the institution’s Senate. “How many seats did you have in mind?’ Ted enquired. “Three!” was the belligerantly-delivered response. “Oh,” responded the V-C. “I had in mind nine.” It was, as they say, something of a non-event. I have the impression that a lot of the decade was rather like that. Perhaps history will eventually settle on a different view.
I’m reminded of the story circulating among historians about an international conference at which, for the first time, a number of Chinese scholars were present. Over dinner one of the British delegates enquired of his Chinese colleagues, “What is the Chinese view of the significance of the French Revolution?” After some discussion the response came back, “We think that it is too early to say.” Maybe that is the view we ought to take of “The Sixties”, but I do suspect that the sense of nostalgia for an exciting era that still circulates among metropolitan radicals such as Harding might need to be challenged. As the Chinese might say, however, perhaps it is too early to say.
*I was a supporter of the more radical group associated with CND, the Committee of 100, but it was a pretty undramatic affair on the whole. (Perhaps more of that anon.) Also my graduated year in Canada was spent writing a dissertation on Canadian CND.