1963 : A Year to remember and a Year to forget

It is not the fashion to use AD (Anno Domini or The Year of our Lord) to mark the two millennia after Jesus Christ. Instead we use the euphemism CE for Common Era. In its way it is actually even more insulting to the rest of the world as the era being referred to retrospectively is a time seen very much from the perspective of the European hegemony which until the nineteenth century can hardly claim to have been common to the rest of humankind or its historical perspective. These are the times we live in – times which like to overlook inconvenient truths and which gloss the harder lessons of history with a polite fiction.

Fifty years ago I was nine. I was still at St Mary’s Primary School in Maidenhead. The Headmistress was by then the wonderful, elegant Mrs Gladwyn – a girl from Ireland who had arrived in England in the 1930’s & was educated at St Mary’s Strawberry Hill. She was the first women headmistress of any state primary school in the town. My sister was thirteen. I think her January birthday in 1963 was the occasion for a twist party. I can at least remember her twist dress in grey with scarlet pleats and trim. My brother was still in the Juniorate of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. My mother was working but  I’m unsure whether it was yet for McGraw Hill the American publishing house which had built a shiny modern UK headquarters on the edge of town, on the edge of the M4 which still finished in those times at the Thicket Roundabout on the A4 – the old Bath Road. Dad was still a bread baker and we were still living in the tied house in St Mark’s Crescent. He worked for a small bakery named after the owner Mr Jenkins. It had shops mainly in Windsor and the one in Maidenhead where we lived and I think the bakery supplied another shop in Furze Platt.

By June 1963 school was in its summer daze. It was to be a shorter summer holiday for us because the old school building had not been able to open for several weeks after the snow in January. There were burst water pipes all over the town. I do not think before or since I’ve ever been so cold. Snow and the wonderland of winter were charmless in short trousers and long grey wool socks that got damp in the snow and stayed damp all day. I was an altar boy by now and very serious about my religion. I was still young enough to build elaborate May altars in my bedroom. Clearly the Catholic taste for kitsch and my gay gene were already working hand in glove.

Pope John XXIII had just died and as we can see above President John F Kennedy was still very much alive. Half a century on and I’m facing my 60’s. In biblical terms sixty years was considered to be the equivalent of two generations. In my childhood sixty years was considered ancient. It still almost compassed a life’s time for the many though many men and women were by then living into their sixties it was less common for them to live much beyond the three score years and ten allotted to us by the bible. Many of my parents’ family and their friends’ families and acquaintance had lost many more much younger than sixty in the two world wars that shaped their world.

In folk memory the sixties swung; they’re commonly remembered as a time of sexual and social revolution; of the Beatles; of mini skirts; of hash and acid; and of James Bond. That memory is false. 1963 was the time of the two Harolds, Macmillan  and Wilson; the time of Christine Keeler and of Mandy Rice Davies here in England. Ireland was still the land of De Valera; the Irish still a people of emigres. Maps of Africa were still predominantly pink though South Africa had turned the southern part of the continent into the land of apartheid. Separate Development in Africa like Segregation in the USA were euphemisms for naked, brutal, racism. They were never intended to be about equality.

June 1963 the same month JFK spoke the words above saw the making of another speech that made history in quite a different sense. Dr Martin Luther King was answering a speech made earlier in the year by Governor George Wallace of Alabama in which he declared: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!”. Wallace was on the losing side of history rather like the Northern Ireland Unionists in 1912 – Ulster will fight and ulster will be right – Wallace was speaking to a dead past. Instead Dr King turned the eyes of the world towards a better future. He confided his hopes and his dreams to a massive crowd gathered on the Mall of Washington DC, standing in the shadow of Lincoln’s memorial he spoke to a people as enslaved as any have been in human history; a people still singing hopefully that they would overcome someday. How far away those dreams seemed; how impossible those dreams felt in the sultry summer sun of Washington DC;  many believed King’s dreams were nothing more than pipe-dreams – the rhetoric of a lost cause:

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Something particular today stands out amongst those noble ideas; amongst those beautiful words one stands sentinel – Negro. Dr King used it not as a derogatory but rather as a proper noun. It tells us how far we have travelled together on his journey that when we now read this word and it jars. It jars because it reminds us of the improper nature of the claims made on the world by white European monoculturalism which was still in 1963 dominant in every sense and most especially in the wrong sense. That strong sense of wrong and of human rights also inspired the old man in a hurry as he once described himself. Pope John XXIII endeared himself to the world not by being less than a Roman Pontiff magnificently arrayed in public as a Solomon in all his glory but rather by the beguiling humility with which he wore his robes of office. He once observed:

Just before Easter, on April 11th 1963 the Pope published Pacem in Terris a letter addressed to the entire world – on the subject of establishing Universal Peace in truth, justice, charity and liberty:

What has so far been achieved is insufficient compared with what needs to be done; all men must realize that. Every day provides a more important, a more fitting enterprise to which they must turn their hands—industry, trade unions, professional organizations, insurance, cultural institutions, the law, politics, medical and recreational facilities, and other such activities. The age in which we live needs all these things. It is an age in which men, having discovered the atom and achieved the breakthrough into outer space, are now exploring other avenues, leading to almost limitless horizons….

The optimism of Pope John’s words seem particularly extraordinary in the context of the fact he already knew he was dying of cancer. They are also extraordinary for remaining, like Dr King’s, essentially true. His analysis of the needs of the world in which we live; the obligations we share; and hopes we have in common remains as good a political, philosophical and religious testament as any found in anytime and anyplace.

In october 1963 Harold Wilson gave his electrifying speech to the Labour Conference remembered as the white heat of technology speech.  Wilson’s speech not only came in the shadow of the Profumo scandal engulfing the political establishment of the UK but also in the aftermath of the Non! of President de Gaulle who had vetoed the  UK’s entry into the Common Market and thereby overturned the entire foreign policy of the Macmillan government.

Wilson’s analysis of what was wrong in Britain has also stood the test of time. What is most interesting about this speech is how unrhetorical it was by comparison with the soundbites modern politicians employ in “byte” size nuggets dreamt up by someone else –  not even their smallest ideas are really their own. Wilson wrote out his entire speech in longhand before it was typed-up by his secretary, Marcia Williams. This famous phrase like many a famous phrase is not quite the words we choose to remember:

Wilson’s words echo down this half century like a gypsy warning to the denizens of the Labour movement. Like any Cassandra in any age – technological or other – his foresight was ridiculed and his advice ignored. Whatever was said of Thatcherism in the 1980’s no one can deny Wilson had made another, better argument in the 1960’s even if it was one to which no one was minded to listen.That is of course the tragedy of all good advice in all times.

Many tears were shed when John XXIII died; many more when JFK was shot in Dallas,Texas a few months on, on 22nd November 1963. The events of those days were lived out by the world watching in black and white on TV. We had the day off school to watch Kennedy’s funeral on TV at home. We all were sombre. We shared the unspeakable sense of loss. Kennedy in death was quickly an heroic figure. His genius, however, was not heroic it was rather in finding the words to express the profoundly human.

By then the Beatles had had one big hit with She loves You and would enjoy another defining one with I wanna hold you hand. I was still very much in awe of my sister and in thrall to all her fads and fancies. She and I learned the lyrics of the Beatles’ songs and would sometimes sing then again and again until we were both in tears. It was called Beatlemania others might call it hysteria. It seemed real enough to me at the time as I return to them over this half century arc of my life. Then in December also on television the Daleks made their appearance in Doctor Who. It was love at first sight. It was a love unconsummated but still it burns inside me with all my boyish infatuation. today on the edge of sixty I can remember it as if it were yesterday.  Sixty, it hardly seems possible; another impossible dream come true. I can take heart once more from the wisdom of Angelo Roncalli who wrote of turning sixty long before he became pope:

“Sixty years old! It is the most beautiful age! Good health, in addition good sense, a happy disposition to see things more clearly, with kindness, optimism, and trust.”

Kindness; optimism and trust what better companions for my coming times. Meanwhile, let me thank God, my family and my friends for this life’s wonderful richness and for the joy I have had from sharing it with them. I wouldn’t exchange these pearls of love. Beyond price they cannot be bought with all the wealth of nations. Their radiance will outlast time although in time they will be lost to human memory.

In the disappointment, in the pain, in the torment of the daily grind we often forget to look up at the stars and wonder. But when we do we are not just awed by its beauty but by the improbability we should be here on earth watching light older than this world itself yet still lighting up our lives. Our knowledge has taken us to a point where our limited minds can no longer know for ourselves what collective knowledge allows us to accept in good faith. Good faith holds up a mirror to all we know. Within all we know there is always another truth to be unwrapped and at which to wonder. These endeavours to know stretch our understanding to new limits and ultimately they lead us to acknowledge the greatest mystery –  the knowledge of God.