In 1962, Whitehall’s war planners spotted a fatal flaw in their defensive preparations against a surprise nuclear attack. What if the prime minister happened to be on the road when the four-minute warning came? The solution, decided the men from the ministry, was to issue the PM’s driver with a radio link, borrowed from the technology that the AA used to communicate with their mechanics on motorbikes. On receiving the alert, the driver would divert to the nearest public call box, whereupon the PM would phone Whitehall, pass on the nuclear codes, and escalate Armageddon. But what if neither the PM or his driver had the requisite coins to make a call from a phone box? After some back-and-forthing between various departments, Tim Bligh, the principal private secretary, came up with a ruling: if the PM found himself caught short, he should simply reverse the charges. By which time, you can’t help thinking, the four minutes would have passed, and Downing Street would be a handful of radioactive dust.
Peter Hennessy has found this glorious moment of Ealing film comedy daftness buried deep in the national archives. But what makes him such a deft public historian is the way he stitches these patches of rich local colour into a narrative with the widest possible reach. Having dealt with the immediate postwar period in two of his previous books, Never Again: Britain 1945–51 (1992) and Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties (2006), here he picks up his story in 1960, the moment Britain becomes modern. Don’t, though, expect a slack meander through the entire decade, stopping off at the usual staging posts: Profumo, the Pill, Beeching, Mary Quant, blah blah blah. What we have instead is a forensic look at the years from 1960 to 64, what one might call "the low 60s", when everyone aged over 35 still wore a hat out of doors and fanned themselves theatrically with a copy of the Daily Herald if the thermometer looked as if it would go over 75F (24C).
The Wind of Change was the name given to the speech that Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan made in Cape Town when he acknowledged in 1960 that Britain could no longer stand in the way of its African colonies’ self-determination. Here, though, Hennessy tweaks and extends the phrase to cover every kind of social, political and economic gust blowing through Britain around the time of Philip Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” of 1963 when, in one of the poem’s lesser known lines, “every life became … a quite unlosable game”. Ironic, of course, because exactly the opposite was the case. No sooner had Britain acquired all those new motorways, hospitals, plate-glass universities and sexual freedoms than it became anguishingly clear that “every life” might be lost in a single afternoon of red-button madness.
Still, Hennessy is careful not to simply rehash old historical paradigms. Many historians aiming to give a sense of the terror of living in the nuclear age fall back on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Hennessy, by contrast, lengthens the timescale and adjusts the point of view so that we start to see Britain not merely as a cowed bystander in the global arms race but as an active agent in its own nightmare. From the moment in 1957 when the RAF’s V force reached full operational strength, we effectively had radioactive skin in the game. Similarly, Hennessy shifts the likely flashpoint from Cuba to Berlin. Forget about Soviet gunboats chugging through the Caribbean. All it would have taken for the third world war to break out was for a particularly jittery East German border guard to attempt to halt a western military convoy somewhere along the autobahn leading from the free world to the partitioned city.
It is entirely characteristic of Hennessy to leave space in this seismic account for the free play of individual quirks. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev emerges as an oaf who could easily have postured his way into a third world war simply because he wanted to send a message to Mao Zedong about who was the biggest, baddest kid in the communist playground. Hennessy presents Harold Macmillan as a wounded war hero from the Somme – the old man still lived with a piece of Krupp ordnance buried in his thigh – who could never quite bring himself to trust the Germans since they were, he pointed out privately, the “people who have tried to destroy us twice in this century”. All the same, “Mac”, the unofficial hero of this book, was prepared to overlook his instincts about “the Teuton” if it meant advancing his grand design. This was an ambitious plan to position Britain as the hinge between the free world’s two great blocs. On the one hand was the Anglo-American alliance, the historical special relationship that had received such a boost during the recent war and was maintained under Eisenhower and, later Kennedy. On the other was a Europe that was forging itself into a bulwark against communism, and Britain’s relationship with it. Much as Germany still pained Mac literally, it made overwhelming sense for Britain to become fully European. It would take 10 years of hard bargaining, and a lot of undignified pleading with a hostile General de Gaulle, before the country was finally allowed to wave goodbye to Europe’s “outer seven” and join the central sextet at the top table. Oh, how badly we wanted it.
Such is the length of this book – nearly 600 pages long – that it would be easy to slip and slide in the shale of detail. But Hennessy has such a keen associative eye and such a generous heart for the sheer oddness of everything that the narrative spins along like a comfortable chat. There is, for instance, Margaret Thatcher described by Mac in his diary as “a clever young woman MP”. At her first meeting with the great man after her promotion in 1961, she carefully chooses her “best outfit” in “sapphire blue” and announces that she wants to start her new job at the Ministry of Pensions immediately. Taken aback, and perhaps feeling sorry for the civil servants who are about to encounter their terrifying new boss, Mac drawls at her to wait until at least 11am the next morning before turning up at the office and then making a speedy exit – “I shouldn’t stay too long”. There are other wonderful cameos. Enoch Powell, so clever, so wrong, with a voice like “an air raid siren with a Birmingham accent”. And then there’s Reginald Maudling, the chancellor of the exchequer who, it transpires, liked to cut political meetings short in order to be in front of the television in time to watch Come Dancing.
• Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties is published by Allen Lane (£30). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
