Deep into the Sixties by David Kynaston review: 'repeatedly ferrets out the unexpected'

Modern housing under construction beside old tenements in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, c. 1960 | Getty Images

Whether you weren’t around in the Sixties or too drugged to remember them, there is no better guide to what you missed than David Kynaston’s epic chronicling of postwar Britain, the sixth volume of which is as immersively readable history as anyone could wish.

I do mean anyone. Because he draws on such a compendious assortment of sources, from diarists to local newspapers, sociological studies to TV schedules, his account of the year-and-a-half from Churchill’s funeral in January 1965 to a certain football game at Wembley in July 1966 has a dazzling richness. Whether you want to know what was playing on the jukebox when Reggie Kray shot George Connell between the eyes at the Blind Beggar pub, what year Boots started to sell condoms, or which was Britain’s first credit card, it’s all here.*

Hindsight pulls together the past's threads. In July 1965, the first episode of Tomorrow’s World had an item about a school with a new thing called a computer. Two months later Margaret Drabble’s breakthrough third novel, The Millstone, was the world’s first to be computer typeset. It was about an unmarried mother, and as she told the Edinburgh International Book Festival last month, these days it is hard to imagine what a scandalous subject that was.

Did the Sixties really swing? Thanks to films like Darling and Alfie, that’s the image that sticks, but the reality was different. Family Planning Associations refused to see unmarried couples, a 1970 survey found that only nine percent of women had ever used the pill, and unmarried mothers faced heavy pressure to have their babies adopted (Keir Starmer’s formal apology for this was one of the last acts of his premiership).

Racism, homophobia and misogyny were rife, and remained so. Yet time and again we see the stirrings of change - sometimes from seemingly unlikely quarters. Given his ancestor’s track record, for example, the maiden speech by the Marquess of Queensberry in favour of Lord Arran’s 1965 bill to legalise homosexuality might well, as Kynaston says, have prompted an ironic smile from the shade of Oscar Wilde.

Or take abortion. The 1965 Wednesday Play based on Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction portrayed the reality of back-street abortions to an audience of 10 million (!) and was hugely influential. Although it was Ken Loach’s breakthrough as a director, the play probably meant more to his story editor, Tony Garnett, who worked with him on Cathy Come Home the following year. Garnett lost his mother to a back street abortion when he was five. Nineteen days later his father committed suicide.

What did the mid-Sixties mean to Scotland? More than anything, slum clearances and rebuilding. The process was underway south of the Border too (Salford’s Archie Street, seen since 1960 in the title shot of Coronation Street, was bulldozed in 1965) but Glasgow’s rebuilding plans eclipsed everyone else’s, with proportionately more high-rises than anywhere else in Britain (three times London’s, 18 times Birmingham’s).

READ MORE: The Future Starts With Us by Gordon Brown review: 'Impassioned but lacking in zip'

Politically, the 1966 general election saw the SNP double its vote in what Kenneth Roy called its first decent performance, but it still didn’t result in any seats. Culturally, Scotland’s teens had similar tastes to their English counterparts, reflecting what Glasgow University’s Professor Callum Brown calls “a turn to the self”. Both turned out for the Beatles’ last tour, which began at the Glasgow Odeon in 1965, and Dylan’s one in 1966 (he played Glasgow two days after the “Judas” heckle in Manchester).

Then as now, the same themes crop up (Labour discussing special camps for immigrants, and planning to build half a million houses a year), but the real joy of reading Kynaston is the way he repeatedly ferrets out the unexpected. I could provide hundreds of examples, but this one will suffice. It’s 8 February 1966, and Kenneth Williams is writing up his diary after a day at Pinewood filming Carry on Screaming: “Warren Beatty said ‘Hello, Kenny, how's it going?’ Which was very forward of him, but secretly pleased me enormously”.

*The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More by the Walker Brothers; 1965; Barclaycard

Deep Into the Sixties: Britain 1965-6, by David Kynaston, Bloomsbury, £35

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