An essay in universal history

II. THE AFFLUENT YEARS (1953-1973)

17. THE DECLINE OF ENGLAND

1953 was, as we have noted, a pivotal year: the year in which Stalin died, the Korean war came to an end and the first insurrections against Soviet power began, in which the Islamic revolution began in Pakistan and Iran, and DNA was discovered. In spite of the consolidation of a state of cold war between East and West, there was a certain relaxation of tension in the political sphere as Europe entered a new era of peace and prosperity that in the following decades spread to many other parts of the world.

The new era of peace, prosperity and decadence was heralded by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953. Of all the important events of that year this was the richest in symbolism and nostalgia, almost the last splash of monarchical splendour in a world which, though richer in a material sense, had become poorer in a spiritual sense.
As Norman Stone writes, “complete with archbishop, sacred oil, orbs and sceptres, it was an extraordinary spectacle, watched by tens of millions of the relatively new black-and-white television sets. A film-maker of genius, Lindsay Anderson, remarked, later on, that the monarchy was a gold filling in a mouthful of rotten teeth. That fitted the England that emerged, a generation after the coronation. However, the early fifties were a good time. Western Europe was not yet quite competitive, British exports did well, and there were good markets in the old imperial area. Decolonization during the 1950s had been, at least in comparison with French experience, a success, and the new Queen became a considerable expert in it. At home, taxes on income were absurdly high, but there was no tax on fortunes made out of eqiuities, and the banks were generous with overdrafts, charging a low rate of interest. The old England (and Scotland) had an Indian summer, and the great Victorian cities, with Glasgow in the lead, were still the great Victorian cities of industry and empire. But the later fifties showed that this could not last…”²²²
Peter Hitchens nostalgically recalls that world: “By the early 1950s, most of the respectable English middle class had ceased to be especially religious, though they continued to respect faith. Church attendance had ceased to be normal in most of Britain around the time of the 1914–18 war, and had begun to be abnormal after the 1939–45 war. But parents brought up in the lost age of faith still felt it right that their children should be taught beliefs they themselves had lost, but be taught them by someone else.
“So through various schools I was exposed to the last enchantments of Anglicanism as it once was, full of the might, majesty, dominion, and power granted to it by the first Queen Elizabeth. These men had crowned the second Elizabeth before an astonished world in 1953, and made an ordinary young woman our anointed monarch in a ceremony of grandeur, mystery, and poetry, a vast moth-eaten musical brocade that in those days still comfortingly covered up the peeling wallpaper and cracked plaster of our national home.
“I spent time as a non-singing pupil at a cathedral choir school in the softest corner of Southern England, what George Orwell called the sleekest landscape in the world. The cathedral cities of England are unknown elsewhere. Other countries may have cathedrals; one thinks of Chartres, Cologne, or Milan. But they do not have these uniquely English holy places. The great church broods over the small town, once a seat of power but long overtaken in size and importance by some shapeless industrial blob nearby. There is usually an elegant close of eighteenth-century gentlemen’s houses, breathing the sweet combination of Scripture, reason, and tradition which is the whole point of the Anglican compromise. There are gardens and trees almost as ancient as the buildings. All is regulated in an unworldly rhythm by bells and choirs, matins and evensong. They are shrines to a particular view of life, thought, and death.
“Here we were inducted into the mysteries of our national religion, reasonable, surprisingly masculine for a faith that might at first glance seem soppy and weak, confident, and perhaps above all things unself-consciously beautiful. The beauty came from elsewhere as a free gift, in the language of worship and Scripture chosen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For three hundred years it was just so, not especially treasured or remarked, but constant.

“Now it has almost entirely vanished. You can still catch it at Christmas in a village church when a small child with a strong country accent grapples for the first time with the nativity story in the King James Bible, and the music of the eternal flows into the silent building through his hesitating tongue. The tongue is a fire. Likewise, the voice of the dullest and most banal curate is forced to soar as he reads the unaffected, lovely, heartbreaking words of the 1662 order for Holy Matrimony, or its elegiac twin, the earthy, uncompromising burial service. But these treasures, intricate ancient workmanship polished in use to a soft, deep gleam, are now rarely heard. Blander, more diffident, and less disturbing. Rituals, substituting syrupy banality for alarming majesty, have replaced them.

“When I was small, these lovely, disturbing things were normal. There were no alternative modern services or sensible, rewritten Bibles from which every trace of poetry had been carefully removed. There were no jolly modern hymns. The bloodthirsty, vengeful bits of the Psalms were still sung in the ancient monastic cycle inherited from the Romish past. Priests and ministers (the title depending on how Protestant they were) wore academic hoods and gowns to remind us that they were learned, thoughtful men. These flashes of red and blue were, in fact, their chief adornments, worn atop austere Calvinist black and white surplices. The cathedral into which we filed, sometimes twice a day, was both richly ornamented and austere, a combination I have found nowhere else and which satisfies a profoundly English desire for modesty and restraint, even in the presence of glory.
“I was brought up among such people, and I shared this taste. I still do. It is one of the most important things about me over which I have no control. Amid these crumbling arches stood and stands the Arundel Tomb which Philip Larkin was to make famous in his great poem, where he teeters (as he so often does) on the brink of faith before turning abruptly away . . . qualifying the seemingly confident, semi-biblical proclamation that ‘what will survive of us is love’ with the words ‘our almost-instinct, almost true.’
“’Almost’ is the word Larkin uses when he wants to believe, yet decides not to, as in ‘The trees are coming into leaf, like something almost being said.’ Actually, if the yearly revival of the woodlands catches you that way, as it does in my case, there is no “almost” about it. His hesitation, as he surely knew, was an Anglican characteristic. No minister or preacher, his bare dusty words surrounded by the ancient canticles and psalmody which were then the context of all our worship, would have dared to be emphatic, let alone enthusiastic. Ambiguity and loveliness helped us to accept, quite happily and without effort, something which is very difficult to credit. We believed completely in the entire creed, but poetically and musically and architecturally, in ways which naked prose cannot express.
“I have never understood why people jeer at this form of belief. ‘Oh,’ they say dismissively, ‘You just like the old buildings and the music, and the Shakespearean language.’ They say this as if ‘liking’ these things were a meaningless self-indulgence, an aesthetic fancy, like preferring China tea to Indian (which I don’t). My own view then and ever since is that the languages of architecture, music, and poetry work mightily on us when we are not aware of it, slip past our everyday defenses and so convey the unspeakable grandeur of God to us better than any other means. The haunting rhythms and shadowy shapes of the eternal disturb the banalities of the temporal, and no properly conscious human being comes out of a cathedral or ancient parish church the same as he or she went in. You might have thought that these were gifts we should take care to treasure and use aright. By themselves, simply by being there, they must have quietly wafted the spirit of God into millions of lives.
“Not now. If I go back (as I recently did), there are traces of what I saw then. But most of it has been tidied away, along with the crumbling and rather alarming tombs in the grass around the building, which always seemed about to open and disclose their shrouded occupants, climbing out into the modern day like a Stanley Spencer resurrection. New glass doors, modern heating, modern lighting, welcome desks, tea-rooms, and bookstalls come between the visitor and the shadowed spaces. The services are shorter, the Bibles newer, the stone cleaner; the unsettling sweetish whiff of moldering coffins in ancient vaults has gone. So has the peace and so has the air of timeless authority. The modern world has got in. The particular place of which I speak is roiled by shame and anger about the abuse of children by priests, long unchecked and now belatedly acknowledged.
“When I experienced that cathedral and city as a child, I saw an ordered, peaceful, gentle England in which two things were entirely taken for granted among all classes: that the courts were just and that we were free people.
“I do not think my feeling of almost complete security, in a country where every road ended at the sea and even the worst enemy in the world had not managed to reach us or seriously damage us, was merely personal. I think it was true…”²²³
The fall of the Anglican Church – not from a state of grace, for this Calvinist creation was never part of the One True Church, but from its former position of authority, security and dignity - was remarkably swift. It fell to a weapon that the English have always prided themselves on possessing – humour. Only that weapon now began to be turned, less than ten years after the coronation of Elizabeth II, on the Church that conducted that impressive ceremony – with devastating long-term results.
Hitchens again: “A vaguely conscious English person of 2016 probably associates the Established Church much more with sex than with God. Perhaps if I explain a little about a book that was recently withdrawn from publication due to certain disputed facts, I can also explain why the Church of England has passed in a generation from significance to insignificance. The book’s title, That Was the Church That Was, has a double meaning, open only to a certain generation of British persons. The title does not just mean “that was the church that used to be.” It is a conscious reference to a revolutionary moment in British culture, a short-lived TV program called That Was the Week That Was, also called TW3, which was screened late on Saturday evenings for a few short months in 1962 and 1963 and has never been forgotten by those (including this writer) who watched it.
“Before it was broadcast, we still had the ability to be shocked and scandalized. Afterwards, we had lost that capacity. We had passed through amazement into acceptance that we were not the country or the people we had once been. It was round about then that most of us probably accepted in our hearts that we would rather sink, giggling, into the sea than take part in any scheme aimed at national salvation.
“Every comforting belief, including religion, was turned into a huge joke. It was very funny, but we were a little ashamed of finding it so. Many subsequent TV programs have tried to emulate it, but they cannot, because such delicious shock is something you can only experience once, just as you can only lose your virginity once.
“During this brief time of transformation, a sex-and-espionage scandal called the Profumo affair accelerated the collapse, amid gleeful ridicule, of all that was left of Britain’s Victorian establishment. The program’s satire would not seem very potent now, but that is the point: It did then. The show began each week with the scratchy, raucous jazz-club voice of the red-haired singer Millicent Martin. (We somehow knew her hair was red even though our TV was all in black and white. Perhaps it sounded red.) ‘That was the week that was,’ she cawed. ‘It’s over, let it go.’ And then she dismissed the events and people of the previous week with cackling sarcasm.
“I remember, one week, that a Church of England vicar had written in to the BBC to complain. They broadcast his complaint in the strange medieval chant familiar to any Anglican churchgoer (however occasional). ‘Millicent Martin is simply repulsive,’ intoned an unseen voice, in the style normally used to plead each morning and evening the timeless and never redundant plea ‘Give Peace in Our Time, O Lord.’ The studio audience laughed mightily. The point about this is that, in 1963, even unbelievers knew and recognized what was being mocked. Now they wouldn’t have the faintest idea, and parsons don’t chant like that anymore. They’re too busy launching group hugs or devising rap liturgies.
“The shriveling of the majestic Anglicanism of my childhood into the unending quarrel about sex which it has become is a symbol of its decay. That Was the Church That Was (I think I can reveal without causing any grave difficulties to anyone) is dominated by factional differences between evangelical conservatives and liberal Catholics, by office politics, by money troubles, and by struggles over homosexuality and over the ordination of women. It is hardly at all about trying to maintain the Christian faith in an age of secularism. Nowhere does it discuss the mysterious but willful destruction of the mighty poetic force of the Bible and Prayer Book, which has turned the thunder and trumpets of Anglican worship into a series of squeaks and squawks, accompanied by tambourines and guitars. This rejection of solemnity and mystery helped to make possible the shrinking of a great Church into a series of squabbles. Both events are consequences of the general inability of a once important people to take themselves seriously anymore…
“So ended a global empire which dispatched fleets of giant gray warships round the world to secure its wealth and which needed to be underpinned by serious ideas, nobly phrased and spoken by serious people. A post-imperial country increasingly famous for the Beatles (for heaven’s sake) and the miniskirt did not need such things. Although the deep old sources of our wealth were drying up, we were for a time affluent. No other power could so effectively have dispelled the austere, hollow-cheeked stoicism, the tolerance of bad food in inadequate amounts, the thin sour beer, watered to help the war effort, the national motto of ‘mustn’t grumble.’
“English Protestantism, with its secret enjoyment of the chilly, the grim, and the frugal, was killed in fifteen years by supermarkets and TV commercials, fake Italian restaurants, cheap holidays in Spain. The Church’s loveliest and most accessible service, Evensong, was killed off in many parishes because, in the days before VCRs, worshippers preferred to watch a dramatization of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga on TV. Thus do great traditions end, and a culture that in living memory still read The Pilgrim’s Progress and readily recognized quotations from Isaiah now watches Sex in the City and thinks Vanity Fair is a magazine. I have learned, in a time of loss where anything good and beloved fights to survive, to mourn such departures but not to imagine that, in this life, what is lost will ever return. It will not. But anyone who is pleased that it is gone for good is a fool…”²²⁴
England had lost her “hard” power – in part voluntarily, as when she gave independence to so many of her colonies around the world, and partly involuntarily, as when she was forced, under American pressure, to abandon the military attempt to recover the Suez Canal in 1956. However, what she lost in hard power, she unexpectedly gained in “soft” power – the extraordinary world-wide influence gained by the so-called “cultural renaissance” associated with “The Swinging Sixties”: in music, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, in fashion with the miniskirt and other innovations coming from London’s Carnaby Street, in several cult films, like the James Bond franchise, and most significantly in a general and spectacularly rapid collapse of sexual morality. Of course, England was not alone in this cultural revolution – so different, and in its own, subtler way just as damaging, although less violent, than the fearsome one taking placing at the same time in Mao’s China. American Hollywood films and music, especially Elvis Presley, played their part, as did European and Indian influences. But England led the way – and rarely, if ever, has an empire collapsed so swiftly only to rise again in a completely different form, a new form of cultural imperialism.