01/02/2015
Three good articles from Booker, today â including a further report on the sinister
Court of Protection. The "third" asks pointed questions about how greens view the "
environment", remarking on their different attitudes to wind farms and fracking.
But the story that caught my eye was
his one on Churchill, under the headline: "Those under 60 won't remember the strange feeling after Churchill's death".
Many good things have been said and written about the 50th anniversary of Churchill's funeral, Booker tells us, but one thing missing, which it might be hard for anyone under 60 to understand, was the way there seemed to be something unreal about that extraordinary event. It was only ten years since Churchill had stepped down as prime minister. But in those few years Britain had been through the most dramatic social and psychological revolution in her history.
It had begun when the staid post-war Britain of the early Fifties suddenly gave way to the age of television, "affluence" and rock 'n' roll. It continued with the rise of "sexual permissiveness" and tower blocks changing the scale of our cities. It reached its climax in the hysteria of 1963, when the rise of Beatlemania and the fall of Harold Macmillan marked the watershed between "Old England" and the "New".
The following year, when London was hailed as "the most swinging city in the world", the media became obsessed with a "New Aristocracy" of pop singers, model girls and "classless" young photographers.
Then, in the midst of this torrent of change, came the death of the towering figure who now seemed to belong to a different world; whose life stretched far back into the Victoria era, when Britain ruled over the greatest empire the world ever knew, whose virile leadership in the Second World War already seemed part of a Britain now vanished into the past.
When a few years later, Booker wrote a book called
The Neophiliacs, analysing the revolution that had so transformed English life in the Fifties and Sixties. In it, he described how "we" watched the grainy black-and-white television images of that funeral with a strange sense of unease.
"It was as if a nation which for years had been subjecting itself to faked emotion, turning its back on the past to lose itself in the unnatural glare of the present, was now desperately trying to conjure up the real emotion which it knew to be appropriate and finding that it no longer quite knew how", Booker writes now.
When we buried Winston Churchill, he concludes, we buried the British nation. The funeral, like those dipping cranes of what had been the world's greatest port, was the epitaph for a Britain which had already vanished into a past to which we no longer really knew how to relate.
The interesting thing about all this is that I was 17 when Churchill died. I was still at school, taking A-levels, but took time off with two school friends to queue up in order to file past the coffin lying in state. I remember it to this day, now just over fifty years ago.
For sure, part of Booker's narrative is as I recall it. We all though the death of Churchill marked a turning point â the end of an era. But Booker was older and heavily into the London "in" scene. All that sixties stuff passed me by.
As well as my studies, I was a staff cadet at RAF Hendon, spending every weekend at the gliding school, using the very airfield from which Churchill flew in the No, 24 Squadron de Havilland Flamingo on many of his adventures â including his abortive meeting with the French government, just before the fall of France in 1940.
The next year I got a flying scholarship, gaining my private pilot's license on my eighteenth birthday. I never returned to school, getting a job at the airfield, where I lived and breathed aircraft seven days a week, living in a dilapidated caravan at the bottom of the runway of a former satellite airfield, close to RAF North Weald.
By the time I rejoined the world, a short career in the RAF was over and I'd spent a year in an Israeli Kibbutz, ending up driving a D4 Caterpillar tractor on the cotton fields. I don't recall taking any real interest in British politics until the 1975 referendum on the Common Market.
Oddly enough, for me, that marked the watershed, when I realised that we were walking eyes wide shut into a new legal order which drove a cart and horses through British traditions.
As for Churchill, as a keen student of World War II, right through my teens â and an active wargamer â he was our hero. Then, I never understood why the parents of my North London friends were not so keen on him, and only with writing
The Many not the Few did I learn something of the dark side of the war leader â the man who wanted to turn guns on East Enders to keep them from using the Underground as shelters during the Blitz.
Perhaps, actually, the real watershed was 1945, when the nation refused to elect Churchill, the war leader, as their peacetime prime minister, and chose Clement Attlee instead. Perhaps it's then, politically, that things changed. But that's before I was born.
