There is no better measure of the pivotal importance of 1963 than to recall what Britain was like in the early 1950s, as we slowly emerged from the shadows of the second world war. The great Labour experiment of 1945 had petered out in a grim slog through years of austerity and rationing. With Winston Churchill back in No. 10, life had begun to crawl back to ‘normality’. Conservative values ruled: respect for tradition, discipline and authority. The old class structure still stood. No extramarital sex or homosexuality. In the cinema we were entertained by cosy Ealing comedies and films portraying the ‘stiff upper lip’ spirit which had won the war. Pop music, hardly ever allowed on the BBC, centred on crooners such as Frankie Laine and adaptations of folk songs. The pomp and pageantry of the Coronation in 1953 reminded us how Britain still stood proudly at the centre of a worldwide empire.
Between 1955 and 1957, however, this complacent mood was rudely challenged by the first harbingers of a different world to come — commercial television, the great rock’n’roll craze inspiring a new ‘teenage culture’, ‘Angry Young Men’, the humiliation of Suez.
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