@littlek,
BACK IN OCTOBER ‘59
With winter about to set in….
Part 1:
On 15 June 2013, as winter was beginning in Australia, Richard Davenport-Hines wrote a review in The Guardian. The review had the title Modernity Britain: Opening the Box by David Kynaston.1 The latest volume in David Kynaston's history of Britain was, wrote Davenport-Hines, “a gleeful and compassionate account of the 1950s that evokes the sumptuous messiness of human experience.”
“This fifth volume of elegant, vividly memorable books,” he continued, “has been published by Kynaston, with the following individual titles: A World to Build, Smoke in the Valley, The Certainties of Place, A Thicker Cut and now Opening the Box. The book depicts history as an unfolding, ill-managed pageant in which politicians, opinion-makers and cultural leaders stumble through their parts amid sharp vox-pop interjections from various well-known characters.
Part 2:
This volume opened with the day in January 1957 when Harold Macmillan succeeded Anthony Eden as prime minister in the aftermath of the Suez debacle. It closed with the resounding re-election of Macmillan's Conservative government in October 1959.
In January 1957 I was 12, on the puberty cusp, and in grade 7 in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe on the north shore of Lake Ontario down at the left-end in what was then the small town of Burlington. In October 1959 I was in high school, was the home-run king in that small town’s midget-hardball league, and had just joined the Baha’i Faith, a Faith which claimed to be the latest of the Abrahamic religions. At the time there were about 800 Baha’is in all of Canada.
Part 3:
The reasons for Labour's defeat had been foreshadowed by its party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, in a private conversation of 1958. "Labour is a high taxation party; Labour is a trade union party; Labour is a nationalisation party, and Labour is not as sound as the Tories on foreign issues," he lamented.
“Kynaston, in this shrewd, funny and ever-readable book, depicts Britain in 1957-59 as a country chafing at traditional puritanical paternalism, and both gullible and indiscriminate as it edged towards tacky, often destructive forms of modernity. Britain was a prim nation where, until 1957, there was a total ban on TV programs between five and six in the afternoon to make it easier for parents to put children to bed without tears about what they were missing on "the box".”
“Similarly, the BBC refrained from reporting by-election campaigns in news bulletins lest it be accused of influencing voters, until Granada's coverage of the Rochdale by-election in 1958 established TV as the new hustings.” These were the words of Davenport-Hines and, since I know little about Britain in the late ‘50s, not much more than I did in 1959, I accept his authority on the subject, his authority as a writer and as a historian.
Part 4:
I knew none of this, as I say back in ’59, ensconced as I was in a small town culture in a conservative country like Canada, in my mid-teens. I was a sport-loving kid who did well at school due to my good memory, and my ambition to get the highest marks I could so I could get to university. This would help me, so went my reasoning back then, to avoid all those mind-numbing jobs, jobs which were mine for the summers, and which stimulated my enthusiasm for academic study by summer’s end.
Everyone I knew was part of that holy-trinity of Catholic, Protestant and Jew. There were no other religions in that all-white town where the Chamber of Commerce praised its thrift and industry. I was comfortable; most of my friends were sinners and heathens, never went to church, often, though, used the word “Jesus”, and worried about acne and getting girl-friends. As the years went on, they turned into solid atheists and agnostics, nihilists and skeptics, and remained far, far from that complacent holy trinity.
My friends found it strange that I would become a member of the Baha’i Faith which they knew nothing about, and that was the way it stayed during all my years in that little town in southern Ontario. As my enthusiasm for this new religion increased, the indifference of my friends remained consistently the same.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Richard Davenport-Hines, The Guardian, “Modernity Britain: Opening the Box by David Kynaston,” 15 June 2013.
The tempest came in when
I was about 18; it was never
understood as it stripped my
young tree with its winter of
deep cynicism hanging at the
periphery of my house….with
that mild schizo-affective state
threatening to bury me in bleak
and lonely landscapes. Somehow,
though, forgiveness came, and an
unselective flooding rain…A seed
was there. God hadn’t died; nor did
He move to Uganda, nor abandon us
for Russia. I caught a glimpse of Him
in the clearing smoke of the rifles in
the barrack-square of Tabriz. Even if no
one else I knew caught that glimpse….It
was enough for me to sing that new song.
Now the earth is flooded with its felicity;
Still I falter, Lord. I quaver…Still I sing!1
1 With thanks to Roger White, “New Song,” Another song Another Season, George Ronald, Oxford, 1979, pp. 116-118.
Ron Price
2/10/’13
