During the Easter break, I stumbled across Dr Geoff Lindsey’s video – 1962: The Year That Killed RP. In the video he references A.C. Gimson’s first (1962) edition of Introduction to the Pronunciation of English, in which Gimson claimed that Received Pronunciation (RP) was:
“finally fixed as the speech of the ruling class, through the conformist influence of the public schools of the nineteenth century.
“Great prestige is still attached to this implicitly accepted social standard of pronunciation… [and] it has become more widely known and accepted through the advent of radio… bringing the accent to the ears of the whole nation.
“[RP] excites least prejudice of a regional kind. [Indeed] the more marked characteristics of regional speech… are tending to be modified in the direction of RP, which is equated with the ‘correct’ pronunciation of English.”
Lindsey then draws attention to Gimson’s apparent U-turn on the cover of the second (1970) edition:
“The eight years since this book’s first publication have produced a number of changes both in the study of pronunciation and in English pronunciation itself…
“The status of Received Pronunciation has recently lost ground, especially among young people…”
In the video – which is well worth the view – Lindsey asks what happened to RP? And then provides the shorthand answer, “the 1960s happened.” Those of us who lived through the 1960s, will no doubt nod in acknowledgement of the huge changes that took place in Britain during that decade.
Lindsey goes on to discuss the cultural revolution that was taking place around the time Gimson’s book was published, and that had largely run its course by the time of the second edition. Symbolically, perhaps, 1962 was also the year when the Beatles released their first record, and when the first (or second if you count Barry Nelson in the 1954 version of Casino Royale) James Bond movie.
It was also a time when the Tory Government was falling into disrepute as a result of the kind of scandals that are all too common in governments which have been in office for too long. And also, a time when a new generation of satirists such as the genial Peter Cook and the more mercenary David Frost mocked the establishment in a manner which would have been unacceptable a decade previously.
Nevertheless, there is something unsatisfactory about claiming a period of time as being in and of itself a cause of massive cultural upheaval. Obviously, attempting to explain what happened to bring about the cultural revolution of the period would take a series of videos of its own. So, it is no criticism of Lindsey himself for not digging beneath the surface. However, since the position of Received Pronunciation is essentially a class question, some mention of the sweeping economic changes that were taking place at the time is required.
Received Pronunciation was one of the means by which the ruling class of an earlier age used to identify one another – wearing the correct tie and knowing which spoon to eat one’s dessert with were others – and has its origins in the Norman occupiers’ (who still own most of Britain’s land to this day) need to distinguish themselves from the oppressed indigenous Britons and Anglo-Saxons. Although, like the British Empire itself, its glory days were in the nineteenth century.
War certainly brought the ruling class into disrepute, although their power was already being undermined by the relegation of the House of Lords and a broader assault on landed estates which reached its height in the 1940s with the imposition of crushing land taxes (which resulted in many properties being handed over to the public as museums and parks). The need to twice mobilise an entire empire between 1914 and 1945 gave economic and cultural weight to a working class which had previously been ignored by those controlling the cultural heights. The immediate post-war years had seen the promotion of a host of working-class actors – including the “angry young men” and Sean Connery (the first James Bond) – even as bands from the working-class districts of Britain’s big cities road the “Merseybeat” wave kicked off by the Beatles.
Less well known though, was the technical failure of the ruling class during the Second World War. Many of the inventions necessary to winning the war, such as the cavity magnetron, were developed by the first generation of working-class engineering graduates. And this promotion of technicians from a much wider class base was mirrored in its way by the humiliation of those public schoolboys who were conscripted into the wartime coal mines.
In A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics since 1900, Joe Hicks and Grahame Allen tell us that:
“Of the employed workforce the overall picture is one of increasing importance of professional, managerial and technical jobs (Classes I and II). The proportion of skilled jobs has been largely constant but obviously the number of jobs involved here will have changed over time. Partly skilled and unskilled jobs are in decline and this has been particularly so in the most recent decades.”
Notice that the trend is at its height during and immediately after the war, as an economy which was growing in both size and complexity demanded a more skilled and professional workforce. So that, by the 1960s, there was considerable debate about what was happening. The decline in the status of RP, and the growing acceptance of regional accents appeared to support those who claimed that the western economies were undergoing a process of “embourgeoisement” – sometimes stated as “we are all middle-class now.” The belief being that in an increasingly hi-tech economy the need for the manual labour of the nineteenth century would disappear, with the hard, menial and dirty roles being taken over by automatons. Some even suggested that as technology worked to increase productivity, we would inevitably move to a 20-hour working week. And eventually, the distinction between work and hobbies would also disappear as all of the routine needs of the economy were taken over by robots and computers.
By the late-1960s though, an alternative school of thought was emerging. Far from the working-class becoming middle-class, the 1960s had actually seen a process of “proletarianization,” in which formerly middle-class white-collar occupations were being downgraded both in income and in control over workload… routine clerical work was becoming as soul-destroying as routine manual work had been a generation before.
The latter line of thought seemed to be born out by the economic crises of the early-1970s, as the lower-middle-classes were often more badly hit than the unionised working classes. And whereas full-employment in the years after the Second World War had empowered workers to raise living standards, the unemployment of the 1970s gave power back to the bosses. So that, while the 1978-79 “winter of discontent” is portrayed in establishment media as an example of “bolshie unions holding the country to ransom,” it was actually a last-ditch attempt by unrepresented workers – such as local government clerks and, famously, grave diggers – to secure a pay rise after years of double-digit inflation. And for the most part, it failed. The incoming Thatcher government simply faced down anyone seeking a pay increase (aside from the electricity generators – needed to keep the lights on – and the police – needed to crack trade unionists’ skulls).
In hindsight then, proletarianization looks more realistic than embourgeoisement. But that would be to overlook the huge rise in working-class living standards during the two-decade post war boom (1953-73) that 1962 was smack in the middle of. It was a period which saw more production and trade than the entire 150 years that separated it from the dawn of the coal phase of the Industrial Revolution. It was also the point at which “the American Dream” came to Britain, as the UK’s suburbs grew, and ordinary workers were able to buy a house, raise a family, run a car, and take an annual holiday on a single income. Nor could anyone argue that the ruling class had lost out over the period. The growth in returns on investment to the ownership class remained on trend throughout the post-war years. Indeed, from the 1970s, they remained on trend… it was only the workers’ share of productivity which declined thereafter.
What is clear – irrespective of abstract discussions of the changing class structure – is that, once the immediate period of post-war reconstruction (roughly 1945 through to the end of rationing in 1954) had ended, the British economy went into overdrive. And this sudden increase in general prosperity, in turn, laid the foundation for the cultural revolution which is encompassed by the term “the swinging sixties.” And it really was a revolution. Post-war Britain had been a stiflingly conservative place. It is easy to forget, for example, that the Conservative Party won the domestic vote in the 1945 general election. That the end result of the election was the UK’s first majority Labour government is down to the votes of troops overseas – no doubt determined that their sacrifice was not simply going to restore the old ruling class to its pre-war position, as had happened to their parents in 1918.
But this, too, points to there being something more to the economic upswing and ensuing cultural changes which swept through Britain between 1953 and 1973. With the exception of the “roaring twenties” in the USA, economic depression usually follows war. This was the case in Europe in the aftermath of the religious wars of the seventeenth century, the Napoleonic wars of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and again in the aftermath of the First World War. So that, even if we point to the post-war boom as a cause of “the sixties,” we are still left without a full explanation. Why should Britain have swung in the 1960s when it had slumped in the 1920s?
To answer this question, we might turn to Matt Semple’s Energy consumption in the United Kingdom:
“Since 1950 there have been major energy supply developments in the United Kingdom economy. These have seen the harnessing of nuclear power for the peaceful purpose of producing electricity; the development of offshore gas, and then oil resources; and the reduction in the size of the coal industry…”
Unlike the USA, which had begun the transition from a coal- to an oil-powered economy in the 1920s (although not rapidly enough to prevent the Great Depression) the UK economy which rose from the ashes of war in 1945 was still coal-powered. Indeed, recovery was delayed as a consequence of the harsh winter of 1946-47 during which:
“Thousands of people were cut off for days by snowdrifts up to seven metres deep during the winter of 1947, which saw exceptional snowfall. Supplies had to be flown in by helicopter to many villages, and the armed forces were called in to help clear roads and railways.
“Between January and March that year, snow fell every day somewhere in the country for 55 days straight. Much of this settled because temperatures stayed very low, just above freezing most days.”
Britain was already experiencing a quiet coal crisis before the snow began to fall. In January 1947, there were just four-weeks of coal stocks compared to the ten-to-twelve-week stockpile common before the war. The ensuing energy crisis, which saw power outages and industrial shutdowns, put recovery back at least by months, and probably years.
Nevertheless, with aid and loans from the USA, whose currency had emerged as the global leader in 1944, the UK did not just rebuild its coal-powered 1939 economy but made a rapid shift (no doubt also encouraged by the world’s biggest oil producer at the time) to oil-power. We see how dramatic this shift was in official energy statistics:
“Until North Sea field discoveries in the 1970s, almost all of the UK’s crude oil was imported. Total crude oil imports, follow the same sharply upward trend as UK refinery intake until 1973, when imports peaked at 115 million tonnes.”
The biggest visible evidence of this energy revolution was in transport, with the development of Britain’s motorways and trunk roads occurring at the same time its railway network was being cut to the bone. For ordinary workers, it could be seen in the growth of car ownership following the production of a series of small and affordable cars – such as the iconic Mini – by a burgeoning automobile industry. Indeed, it was this shift in Britain’s industrial base away from the old, nineteenth century coal-powered industries – mining, steel working, railways, shipbuilding, etc. – to new oil-age industries like aviation, automobiles, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, etc., and the massive investment this had involved, which powered the post war boom.
When, a decade after the horrendous winter of 1947, prime minister Harold MacMillan told Britain’s workers that “you’ve never had it so good,” he wasn’t lying. The economy was reaching a high point which would never be repeated. Living standards were rising at their fastest ever. And with them came the wave of optimism that fuelled the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
The problem was that the new generation – born in the years after the war – came to believe and expect that prosperity could only go in one direction. So that the economic and political textbooks of the period simply assumed an ever upward arc of progress. In reality, it was the additional energy in oil as compared to coal – as harnessed by new oil-age technologies – which had powered the boom – with global growth accelerating at a faster rate than currency could be created, thereby warding off but never quite overcoming the spectre of inflation.
America’s rulers and bankers did what anyone else in their position would have done – they overprinted the dollar to fund the Vietnam war, the cold war, and big domestic social programmes. And so long as the flow of cheap oil continued to grow, they could get away with it. By the late-1960s though, oil production was becoming more expensive just at the point at which the Japanese, European and UK transition to oil was nearing completion. The result was that a dollar which was supposed to be “as good as gold,” and which America’s partners were obliged to settle accounts in, began visibly losing its value. In 1969, while the world was distracted by the first Moon landings, West Germany called America’s bluff by insisting that the USA settle its accounts in gold. France followed in 1970, the year when the currency crisis was compounded by the USA’s loss of control of the world oil price following the peak of its domestic oil production.
By forcing the Americans to settle accounts in gold, the Europeans had also forced them to re-import the inflation they had generated by over-printing dollars in the first place. In August 1971, Nixon brought an end to the charade by “temporarily” taking the dollar off the gold standard. From that point on, the world would trade in entirely “fiat” currency, with value set by global markets… in effect, a currency would be worth whatever markets were prepared to pay.
In practice, Nixon’s action bounced inflation back to the Europeans. And while economists, politicians and establishment media chose to blame militant trade unions and greedy workers, the inflation that marred the 1970s was due to European economies being forced to trade in dollars that were worth far less than their face value.
The problem was exacerbated, of course, by the USA’s oil competitors taking this moment of western weakness to improve their own position. The October 1973 oil shock was artificial to the extent that the OPEC states had imposed their embargo in response to the USA’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. However, with the USA – via the Texas Railroad Commission – no longer able to control world oil supply – and thus world oil prices – the big increase in oil prices – reflecting in part the additional cost of producing Middle East and North African oil – was going to happen eventually.
It is noteworthy that the price of oil never again fell back to its level in the post war boom. And while the production of new – but more expensive – oil deposits off Alaska, in the North Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico helped the western economies recover and enjoy one final debt-based spurt of growth from the late-1980s to the early-2000s, without America’s post-war cheap and abundant oil, even as the rich got richer, each new generation of working people could only watch in despair as previous prosperity evaporated.
Progress, it turns out, is merely a story we like to tell ourselves… mostly to take our minds off the increasingly obvious economic collapse which is taking place around us. The year 1962 – roughly the halfway point in a unique and never-again post-war boom – likely did mark the point at which the massive spurt of oil-based prosperity brought about sweeping cultural change. But even if the ruling elite were obliged to mute their accents, they didn’t go away… they simply found other ways of distinguishing each other from what they still regarded as a deplorable mob.
But “the sixties” had been built on the weak foundation of a finite energy source… one which became ever more expensive to produce as the years went by. Had we not been bamboozled by the energy-blind economics that emerged out of the oil-age to tell us that infinite growth on a finite planet would be easy, we might have noticed that without energy, there can be no prosperity. Instead, even now as the slurping sound of the planet’s last oil deposits being sucked out of the Earth is growing ever louder, a majority remains convinced that the prosperity of the 1960s is still just around the corner.
Denial, it seems, is the only economic resource which is still growing exponentially. Because whatever we may believe they were, the 1960s will never be repeated.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
What an excellent analysis of the 60s etc. As one who has lived through this period, I could add personal bits, but these would be irrelevant to his analysis, except to amplify his points. Good research. He is on the button. Reactionary (eyes roll) : ).
on April 4, 2024, 11:42 pm