Was Philip Larkin right? Did sexual intercourse really begin in 1963? Not according to Frank Mort’s Capital Affairs. For him the swinging ’60s did not come out of nowhere. They emerged in the hot house cosmopolitan atmosphere of London’s West End in the newly affluent 1950s. It was here that the permissive society was really born. There was nothing buttoned up about post-war Soho – a byword for vice and sexual tourism – and Victorian morality was under threat well before the Beatles’ first LP.
Capital Affairs is a sophisticated cultural history that resists easy conclusions about the period. The Wolfenden committee, for example, was as much concerned with regulating prostitution as with homosexual law reform. Mort does not see the ’50s as a comforting story of sexual liberation. Rather, he assembles a cast of rakes, pimps and desperadoes who epitomised the new morality. Striptease, for example, at the Windmill Theatre. And the dark side includes John Christie, the Rillington Place murderer, whose terrible crimes and twisted sexuality punctured cosy notions of English domesticity in the year of the Queen’s coronation.
Most people assume the aristocracy, confronted with the forces of democracy and egalitarianism, lost much of its power and influence during the 20th century. Mort, however, argues that the elite maintained their influence even if it was difficult to believe in the inherent respectability of Britain’s ruling class when Sunday newspapers were full of toffs behaving badly. Going right back to the Elizabethans, we have always relished stories of licentious rakes and swells (check out Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure) and the distance between the underworld and the rich and powerful has never been very great.
The new morality was embodied by the man about town, politically conservative but eager to sample the new pleasures of metropolitan life. Ian Fleming’s James Bond is a fictional example; in real life there was the War Minister Jack Profumo cavorting with the call girl Christine Keeler and rocking Harold Macmillan’s Government. Poor Macmillan was bewildered. He recalled that in his youth “you could be absolutely sure that you could go to a restaurant with your wife and not see a man that you knew having lunch with a tart. It was all kept separate, but this does not seem to happen these days.” What did provincial Britain make of all this? It read about it in the News of the World but, ultimately, the atmosphere of Christine Keeler’s London reshaped the nation’s morality. There have been a number of important reassessments of the 1950s by Peter Hennessey, David Kynaston and others recently. Frank Mort’s book takes its place alongside these as a major statement about a period that shaped our world view and that is still too little understood.
