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Tales of a New Jerusalem #6
Deep Into the Sixties: Britain 1965–66
Not yet published
Expected 24 Nov 26'The most entertaining historian alive' SPECTATOR
'Addictively readable' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, SUNDAY TIMES
A definitive portrait of Britain in the heady throes of the Swinging Sixties, from legendary historian David Kynaston.
It’s the heart of the Sixties in Britain – the Beatles and the Stones vie at the top of the charts, England win the World Cup, and optimism and patriotism percolate through the streets. But this is not the full story of mid-Sixties Britain. Disaffection on the political left increasingly focuses on the escalating Vietnam War; and the ambitious hopes of Harold Wilson’s Labour government start to founder on the parlous state of the pound.
This was a time of looking both backwards and forwards – sweeping reforms to secondary education, huge swathes of urban redevelopment, and the irresistible rise of a confident, free-spending youth culture. Yet everyday life for many, especially beyond the big cities, bore striking resemblance to decades earlier.
Covering the short but intense period from after Churchill’s death in early 1965 to England’s Wembley triumph in July 1966, David Kynaston uses a plethora of contemporary sources, including diaries of ordinary people, to paint a richly nuanced picture of unrivalled detail. Deep Into the Sixties continues to revolutionise how we see post-war Britain.
'Addictively readable' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, SUNDAY TIMES
A definitive portrait of Britain in the heady throes of the Swinging Sixties, from legendary historian David Kynaston.
It’s the heart of the Sixties in Britain – the Beatles and the Stones vie at the top of the charts, England win the World Cup, and optimism and patriotism percolate through the streets. But this is not the full story of mid-Sixties Britain. Disaffection on the political left increasingly focuses on the escalating Vietnam War; and the ambitious hopes of Harold Wilson’s Labour government start to founder on the parlous state of the pound.
This was a time of looking both backwards and forwards – sweeping reforms to secondary education, huge swathes of urban redevelopment, and the irresistible rise of a confident, free-spending youth culture. Yet everyday life for many, especially beyond the big cities, bore striking resemblance to decades earlier.
Covering the short but intense period from after Churchill’s death in early 1965 to England’s Wembley triumph in July 1966, David Kynaston uses a plethora of contemporary sources, including diaries of ordinary people, to paint a richly nuanced picture of unrivalled detail. Deep Into the Sixties continues to revolutionise how we see post-war Britain.
704 pages, Hardcover
First published September 24, 2026
About the author
David Kynaston
44 books85 followersDavid Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951. He has been a professional historian since 1973 and has written eighteen books, including The City of London (1994-2001), a widely acclaimed four-volume history, and W.G.'s Birthday Party, an account of the Gentleman vs. the Players at Lord's in July 1898. He is the author of Austerity Britain, 1945-51, the first title in a series of books covering the history of post-war Britain (1945-1979) under the collective title "Tales of a New Jerusalem".
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October 11, 2026
The front cover here is incredible. A photo of Bob Dylan taken in that Liverpool in 1966 by Barry Feinstein. And you’ve got someone who looks like he comes from another planet posing with a bunch of scruffy kids with grubby faces and shabby clothes.
One of Kynaston’s sources is the diary of television writer Laurence Marks (born 1948, Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart etc), and there’s a salutary section in which he expresses his upset and dismay at being pulled out of school after getting 8 O Levels. So even a child who has passed the 11+ and achieved academic success could just have all that yanked away from him by parents who wanted the “fifteen bob” in the teapot on the mantelpiece (as in another British sitcom, Bread). In other words, social class asserting itself over the whole education (non) magic bullet.
With Wilson as PM and after Heath was elected Tory leader, it was the beginning of a golden era where party leaders weren’t old Etonians, but instead were people who had been educated at grammar schools and then went to university—or not even that. We had a series of them: Wilson, Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, and even John Major—and then the privately educated Tony Blair breaks the run. It’s all downhill from there.
It’s amazing how much closer we seemed then to the abolition of private schools (aka public schools) —or the integration of the public schools into the state system. There’s absolutely zero political will now, but back then it seemed to be on the cusp. There was resistance from the schools themselves and their belief that they would be “picked off like the monasteries”, which is a really interesting analogy I think. Where was our Henry VIII of the education system? We voted not to have you anymore. You do more harm than good.
As always, big themes and major political or economic moves run alongside the diary entries and the long, long sentences listing events minor and major. Through these lists and the diary entries, Kynaston gives you a sense of what it was like to be alive in these times.
On page 103 there is some lovely detail about John Cooper Clark and his art school girlfriend living “just this side of squalor” in a once grand decaying Victorian Villa. They rented a flat full of “heavy dark mismatched horrible old granny furniture” plus a “two-ring baby Belling with a grill. We had fish fingers a lot, alternating with Findus crispy pancakes and Chesswood canned mushrooms on toast.”
And, as well as the politics and the beer and sandwiches with trade unions and the Findus crispy pancakes, we get the cultural background: the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Kinks, Lulu, David Frost, Robert Robinson, Joan Bakewell, Coronation Street and the new cast member for The Avengers. I had no idea that Emma Peel’s name was a pun on M-Appeal!
In the background, football is a very different game to the one that’s played today. Muddy pitches, heavy leather balls, crunching physicality. The World Cup that England won in 1966 is the top prize of a very different game. Violence on the pitch—and violence on the terraces and trains that attracted the same young men in 1965 as are attracted to the “black shorts” anti-immigrant protests in 2026. It’s the promise of violence that brings them. (And according to author of a new book about Hitler’s rise to power, you can explain the success of the Nazi party simply through their promise of violence, their threats of retribution.)
The children’s television of 1965 is the second generation of children’s programming after the Andy Pandy, Woodentops, and Flowerpot Men era. So you’ve got Blue Peter, Jackanory and the Magic Roundabout, Camberwick Green. These are the things that came along in the mid 60s and then continued into the 70s and represent childhood for those of us of a certain age. I’ve even got vague memories of Blue Peter dog Petra’s pups being born and Patch being the one they kept. Petra then Patch and then Shep. And John Noakes joining the cast. Churchill’s funeral, Petra’s pups, Doctor Who’s first regeneration. Indelible ink.
When it came, I was unexpectedly moved by (“Housewife, 49”) Nella Last’s final diary entry on page 196. Twenty million words in her Mass Observation diary!
I didn’t feel well, & as usual, was glad to get to my warm bed.
The Premier of the film Alfie in early 1966 coincides with the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath, which (like Alfie) is chock-full of misogyny: “Under My Thumb”, “Stupid Girl”, and “Out of Time”. Which itself came hot on the heels of all the naked misogyny on Rubber Soul. Something nasty in the air, and Kynaston uses a good quote from Faye Weldon about watching Alfie:
“We watched it and left the cinema trembling. We saw that the indignity, emotional pain and helplessness that went with being a woman in in the 1960s was monstrous and couldn’t, mustn’t last.”
Things are changing, but on many fronts and at different speeds. The great liberal reforms that happened under the 1964–1970 Labour government are in the pipeline: no-fault divorce; legalisation of homosexuality; condoms in Boots; abortion reform; the Brook Advisory Centre making birth control available to even unmarried women.… But there are also huge changes underway in housing, in industry, in the workforce, in the very composition of society.
For this middle section of the book, Kynaston pauses his day-by-day narrative to consider more deeply some of these developments. There is a long section on deindustrialisation. Industry is in decline though still there, even in the London suburbs. You could still get manufacturing jobs, and not just in the North. But the City was coming, and so was the globalised financial sector. The old paternalistic capitalism, those family-run firms with their social clubs and works outings and Christmas hampers, were fading away. I remember as a child going to the Index Printers Christmas party in Dunstable. Every kid got a present. The family home was, for most of my childhood, rented—and it was owned by my dad’s employers. They eventually wanted to divest themselves of their property portfolio and my parents bought it under a kind of privatised right-to-buy scheme.
In the mid-1960s, the Britain of shipyards and coal mines and cotton mills and steelworks was still there, but on the decline. The grommet makers, the widget factors, benders and flatteners and pulverisers; the air full of soot and asbestos and particulates; the schools opposite the factories; the pit villages; the cradle to grave of it all. All those union jobs, Going, going, gone.
And industrial relations were always chronic. Kynaston details a factory that didn’t supply toilet paper to its hourly paid employees. And then, when they finally did, they put it on the outside of the cubicle door. And that distinction between the hourly paid (or weekly paid) blue collar workers and the monthly paid (salaried) white collar workers was a sharp line. Again, at my first Tax Office job, I worked in the section dealing with Vauxhall employees and pensioners. And there were codes for the weekly vs. monthly workers.
It was the difference, then, between having your wages in cash in a brown envelope on a Friday, and having it transferred into your bank account on the last working day of the month. And that stark line of class division was gouged deep into the British psyche.
Kynaston then moves on to the subject of redevelopment and slum clearance and the generally changing architectural face of Britain which accelerated in the 60s. It wasn’t just the blocks of flats. It wasn’t just the urban motorways and inner ring roads. It wasn’t just the bulldozing of whole communities, or the inevitable and slow decay of housing stock in areas earmarked for development. It wasn’t just the gutting of market towns and market places. It was everything, everywhere, all at once (to coin a phrase). It was worse than the Blitz. 3.66 million displaced people.
“[I]n 1965 some 88 per cent of all newly built dwellings (in the public housing sector) were in the form of high flats. As almost throughout the 1950s and 1960s, much of this new build was on the outskirts”
People flung, in other words, from their communities and friends to a stark modernist landscape beyond the ring road, facing expensive bus fares, isolation, loneliness, vandalism, and neglect.
I wonder which was the biggest mistake: the construction of so many high-rises; or the construction of so many urban motorways, ring roads and so on. Of course, it was everything.
The talk (the quoted voices) on the subject of relocation and public housing often turns to the idea that some people are dirty or unhygienic, and it’s a horrible grim environment. The playground, if there is one, gets destroyed; the park area around the flats gets destroyed; people dump rubbish. It’s awful. And the testimony mentions, again and again, that some people are just dirty, and that the council tended to put the dirty people next door to clean people, who would supposedly lead by example.
Then there’s the concept of planning blight, which is what happens when people are told that the area is going to be cleared. So basic maintenance and cleanliness starts to be neglected and the whole area falls into disrepair often because people think the bulldozers are on the way. They called it “slum clearance”, but the houses often weren’t slums to start with. They just became slums because of neglect, because they were allowed to decay.
All this was executed by ‘“an arrogant bureaucratic elite who severed our architectural bonds with the past, destroyed the civic fabric and delivered the British city over to the automobile.”’
The next section of the book is on race relations, starting with the plight of immigrant workers who are discriminated against both by their employer and their supposed union. So workers were often getting it from both sides: given all the shit jobs because they were immigrants, but then ignored by their supposed union because of racism. They paid their dues like paying off a protection racket, but got nothing in return.
And always, always, we return to the notion that “those people” didn’t do enough to fit in, that they were dirty and unhygienic, smelly, that they didn’t understand how to live in a civilised way. From the Daily Mail:
“Most of the pickets can either read nor write. Most too speak no English. Most had to be introduced to piped water, flush lavatories and dustbins when they came here from one to 5 years ago.…”
They won’t integrate, complain their colleagues, who ignore them and won’t speak to them and won’t drink with them. They’re barred from pubs and not invited to works socials. They won’t integrate, they all live in their own area, there are twenty of them in that house. And then you see why: estate agents won’t rent or sell to them in “white” areas; building societies refuse mortgages, or demand a higher deposit, or a higher interest rate. So, yep, there are twenty of them in that one house someone was able to rent.
They won’t integrate, they don’t know the hidden social codes that we all implicitly understand but refuse to talk about. British society, like its language, runs on unspoken rules that most people wouldn’t be able to explain.
He does leave you, Kynaston, wondering about this racism, and the deeply ingrained class consciousness. 1966 was two years away from Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, but the appalling attitudes and prejudice were there, and they still appear to be with us.
There had been a 6-week National Union of Seamen strike soon after the election, settled without much fuss in the end, but doing untold damage to the economy, the gold reserves, and the balance of payments. The quiet killer. But imagine: a time when a British merchant navy had the power to bring shipping to a standstill.
So much personal and national prestige was caught up in the pound and the exchange rate. In July 1966, as Wilson announced a grim and conservative package of measures designed to take the pressure off, the pound was worth $2.80. Staggering. I just checked: it currently stands at $1.32.
This strand of ridiculous national pride in the currency persisted, of course, into the 21st century, and was the main reason many people resisted the very idea of joining the €uro. How much happier might we all be without the fookin’ pound?
Inevitably, the author spends a good deal of time on this matter, which was the most important issue trying the nation in the run-up to the release of Revolver, Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash, and the World Cup final at the Empire Stadium, Wembley.
We’re two thirds of the way through the book, Labour has just convincingly won the 1966 general election, and Kynaston takes stock.
When I saw him speak at the London Library last Wednesday, he was careful to emphasise that though the “Sixties” get seen as this revolutionary decade, it was also a decade of continuity. I’ve acknowledged this over and over again on this blog. Swinging London was a very small circle of hipsters who all knew each other, and you didn’t even have to leave London before you encountered what you might call the Long Fifties. Tradition. Continuity. Terrible food.
How many people still had an outdoor toilet? The answer: a lot. And what did people eat? Findus crispy pancakes, Vesta Chow Mein and fish fingers, yes, but also lots of tinned food. Corned beef (especially in the North East), but more chicken and fresh veg in the poncy South. Fish and chips, especially in the North, and marrowfat peas treated with bicarb to make them bright green.
By 1965, there were almost 13,000,000 motor vehicles in Britain, but still only 47% of journeys were taken by car; and as late as 1968 more than half of urban households did not own one. It’s easy to forget things like this. My dad used to drive terrible old second hand cars, but we did always have one, and a family holiday every summer. And we had a telephone, too, at a time when it was still common for people to come and knock on the door and ask to use it—when the payphone at the end of the street was out of order. And if you had a phone, you probably had a little wooden money box for such people to deposit coins in.
Other areas of continuity that the author identifies include betting shops and football grounds, greyhound stadia, and the working men’s clubs of northern England with their “turns”: comedians, jugglers, singers, and people eating pork pies and mushy peas.
He reminds us too that as well as the Kinks and the Stones and the Who, the charts were full of Mrs Mills and Ken Dodd—and that one of the most popular television shows was Val Doonican; and how Cliff Richard had more weeks on the charts than the Beatles; and how The Sound of Music was not just enormously popular in the cinema, but at number one in the album charts for 69 weeks.
And while the 60s was James Bond, it was also Carry On…; those films, with their seaside postcard humour, people putting up with things, grinning and bearing it all. Underneath all the seaside sauciness, Carry On films were puritanical in their attitudes towards sex. It wasn’t until 1967 when birth control advice was somewhat liberalised. 1966 was still the era when mostly only married women could access the pill, when Boots had only just started selling condoms, when most people’s idea of birth control was coitus interruptus. Heartbreaking tales of forced adoption.
And the book finishes with a tour de force of a final chapter. It’s the world cup final, and Kynaston weaves Kenneth Wolstenholme’s BBC commentary (in italics) with his usual semi-colon long-listing of what people were up to. Who was watching, who wasn’t. There were still garden fêtes, people working shifts, race meetings. That evening, lots of greyhound racing. And Bob Charlton senior is on his shift cutting coal at Linton Colliery while his two sons make history. Incredible.
It’s a powerful package, a blow-by-blow record from the sources and diarists as England make heavy weather of their match against West Germany. Laurence Marks has a bet on with a friend and needs England to lose. Peter Cook is in a pub or club (?) somewhere and his neighbour opens champagne a few minutes before the end of the 90 minutes (a classic “Nothing can go wrong now!” moment), with England 2:1 up. And then the Germans equalise, and, Peter Cook turns to his neighbour and says, “If you open your fucking mouth an extra time I’ll kill you.”
And just as I did when Mark Lewisohn reached the “You’ve just made your first number one record” moment in Tune In, I wept at Wolstenholme’s they think it’s all over.
An incredibly moving final chapter. Brilliant.
(According to what the author said last Wednesday, the next volume will cover late 1966 to early 1970. I’m already excited.)
One of Kynaston’s sources is the diary of television writer Laurence Marks (born 1948, Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart etc), and there’s a salutary section in which he expresses his upset and dismay at being pulled out of school after getting 8 O Levels. So even a child who has passed the 11+ and achieved academic success could just have all that yanked away from him by parents who wanted the “fifteen bob” in the teapot on the mantelpiece (as in another British sitcom, Bread). In other words, social class asserting itself over the whole education (non) magic bullet.
With Wilson as PM and after Heath was elected Tory leader, it was the beginning of a golden era where party leaders weren’t old Etonians, but instead were people who had been educated at grammar schools and then went to university—or not even that. We had a series of them: Wilson, Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, and even John Major—and then the privately educated Tony Blair breaks the run. It’s all downhill from there.
It’s amazing how much closer we seemed then to the abolition of private schools (aka public schools) —or the integration of the public schools into the state system. There’s absolutely zero political will now, but back then it seemed to be on the cusp. There was resistance from the schools themselves and their belief that they would be “picked off like the monasteries”, which is a really interesting analogy I think. Where was our Henry VIII of the education system? We voted not to have you anymore. You do more harm than good.
As always, big themes and major political or economic moves run alongside the diary entries and the long, long sentences listing events minor and major. Through these lists and the diary entries, Kynaston gives you a sense of what it was like to be alive in these times.
On page 103 there is some lovely detail about John Cooper Clark and his art school girlfriend living “just this side of squalor” in a once grand decaying Victorian Villa. They rented a flat full of “heavy dark mismatched horrible old granny furniture” plus a “two-ring baby Belling with a grill. We had fish fingers a lot, alternating with Findus crispy pancakes and Chesswood canned mushrooms on toast.”
And, as well as the politics and the beer and sandwiches with trade unions and the Findus crispy pancakes, we get the cultural background: the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Kinks, Lulu, David Frost, Robert Robinson, Joan Bakewell, Coronation Street and the new cast member for The Avengers. I had no idea that Emma Peel’s name was a pun on M-Appeal!
In the background, football is a very different game to the one that’s played today. Muddy pitches, heavy leather balls, crunching physicality. The World Cup that England won in 1966 is the top prize of a very different game. Violence on the pitch—and violence on the terraces and trains that attracted the same young men in 1965 as are attracted to the “black shorts” anti-immigrant protests in 2026. It’s the promise of violence that brings them. (And according to author of a new book about Hitler’s rise to power, you can explain the success of the Nazi party simply through their promise of violence, their threats of retribution.)
The children’s television of 1965 is the second generation of children’s programming after the Andy Pandy, Woodentops, and Flowerpot Men era. So you’ve got Blue Peter, Jackanory and the Magic Roundabout, Camberwick Green. These are the things that came along in the mid 60s and then continued into the 70s and represent childhood for those of us of a certain age. I’ve even got vague memories of Blue Peter dog Petra’s pups being born and Patch being the one they kept. Petra then Patch and then Shep. And John Noakes joining the cast. Churchill’s funeral, Petra’s pups, Doctor Who’s first regeneration. Indelible ink.
When it came, I was unexpectedly moved by (“Housewife, 49”) Nella Last’s final diary entry on page 196. Twenty million words in her Mass Observation diary!
I didn’t feel well, & as usual, was glad to get to my warm bed.
The Premier of the film Alfie in early 1966 coincides with the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath, which (like Alfie) is chock-full of misogyny: “Under My Thumb”, “Stupid Girl”, and “Out of Time”. Which itself came hot on the heels of all the naked misogyny on Rubber Soul. Something nasty in the air, and Kynaston uses a good quote from Faye Weldon about watching Alfie:
“We watched it and left the cinema trembling. We saw that the indignity, emotional pain and helplessness that went with being a woman in in the 1960s was monstrous and couldn’t, mustn’t last.”
Things are changing, but on many fronts and at different speeds. The great liberal reforms that happened under the 1964–1970 Labour government are in the pipeline: no-fault divorce; legalisation of homosexuality; condoms in Boots; abortion reform; the Brook Advisory Centre making birth control available to even unmarried women.… But there are also huge changes underway in housing, in industry, in the workforce, in the very composition of society.
For this middle section of the book, Kynaston pauses his day-by-day narrative to consider more deeply some of these developments. There is a long section on deindustrialisation. Industry is in decline though still there, even in the London suburbs. You could still get manufacturing jobs, and not just in the North. But the City was coming, and so was the globalised financial sector. The old paternalistic capitalism, those family-run firms with their social clubs and works outings and Christmas hampers, were fading away. I remember as a child going to the Index Printers Christmas party in Dunstable. Every kid got a present. The family home was, for most of my childhood, rented—and it was owned by my dad’s employers. They eventually wanted to divest themselves of their property portfolio and my parents bought it under a kind of privatised right-to-buy scheme.
In the mid-1960s, the Britain of shipyards and coal mines and cotton mills and steelworks was still there, but on the decline. The grommet makers, the widget factors, benders and flatteners and pulverisers; the air full of soot and asbestos and particulates; the schools opposite the factories; the pit villages; the cradle to grave of it all. All those union jobs, Going, going, gone.
And industrial relations were always chronic. Kynaston details a factory that didn’t supply toilet paper to its hourly paid employees. And then, when they finally did, they put it on the outside of the cubicle door. And that distinction between the hourly paid (or weekly paid) blue collar workers and the monthly paid (salaried) white collar workers was a sharp line. Again, at my first Tax Office job, I worked in the section dealing with Vauxhall employees and pensioners. And there were codes for the weekly vs. monthly workers.
It was the difference, then, between having your wages in cash in a brown envelope on a Friday, and having it transferred into your bank account on the last working day of the month. And that stark line of class division was gouged deep into the British psyche.
Kynaston then moves on to the subject of redevelopment and slum clearance and the generally changing architectural face of Britain which accelerated in the 60s. It wasn’t just the blocks of flats. It wasn’t just the urban motorways and inner ring roads. It wasn’t just the bulldozing of whole communities, or the inevitable and slow decay of housing stock in areas earmarked for development. It wasn’t just the gutting of market towns and market places. It was everything, everywhere, all at once (to coin a phrase). It was worse than the Blitz. 3.66 million displaced people.
“[I]n 1965 some 88 per cent of all newly built dwellings (in the public housing sector) were in the form of high flats. As almost throughout the 1950s and 1960s, much of this new build was on the outskirts”
People flung, in other words, from their communities and friends to a stark modernist landscape beyond the ring road, facing expensive bus fares, isolation, loneliness, vandalism, and neglect.
I wonder which was the biggest mistake: the construction of so many high-rises; or the construction of so many urban motorways, ring roads and so on. Of course, it was everything.
The talk (the quoted voices) on the subject of relocation and public housing often turns to the idea that some people are dirty or unhygienic, and it’s a horrible grim environment. The playground, if there is one, gets destroyed; the park area around the flats gets destroyed; people dump rubbish. It’s awful. And the testimony mentions, again and again, that some people are just dirty, and that the council tended to put the dirty people next door to clean people, who would supposedly lead by example.
Then there’s the concept of planning blight, which is what happens when people are told that the area is going to be cleared. So basic maintenance and cleanliness starts to be neglected and the whole area falls into disrepair often because people think the bulldozers are on the way. They called it “slum clearance”, but the houses often weren’t slums to start with. They just became slums because of neglect, because they were allowed to decay.
All this was executed by ‘“an arrogant bureaucratic elite who severed our architectural bonds with the past, destroyed the civic fabric and delivered the British city over to the automobile.”’
The next section of the book is on race relations, starting with the plight of immigrant workers who are discriminated against both by their employer and their supposed union. So workers were often getting it from both sides: given all the shit jobs because they were immigrants, but then ignored by their supposed union because of racism. They paid their dues like paying off a protection racket, but got nothing in return.
And always, always, we return to the notion that “those people” didn’t do enough to fit in, that they were dirty and unhygienic, smelly, that they didn’t understand how to live in a civilised way. From the Daily Mail:
“Most of the pickets can either read nor write. Most too speak no English. Most had to be introduced to piped water, flush lavatories and dustbins when they came here from one to 5 years ago.…”
They won’t integrate, complain their colleagues, who ignore them and won’t speak to them and won’t drink with them. They’re barred from pubs and not invited to works socials. They won’t integrate, they all live in their own area, there are twenty of them in that house. And then you see why: estate agents won’t rent or sell to them in “white” areas; building societies refuse mortgages, or demand a higher deposit, or a higher interest rate. So, yep, there are twenty of them in that one house someone was able to rent.
They won’t integrate, they don’t know the hidden social codes that we all implicitly understand but refuse to talk about. British society, like its language, runs on unspoken rules that most people wouldn’t be able to explain.
He does leave you, Kynaston, wondering about this racism, and the deeply ingrained class consciousness. 1966 was two years away from Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, but the appalling attitudes and prejudice were there, and they still appear to be with us.
There had been a 6-week National Union of Seamen strike soon after the election, settled without much fuss in the end, but doing untold damage to the economy, the gold reserves, and the balance of payments. The quiet killer. But imagine: a time when a British merchant navy had the power to bring shipping to a standstill.
So much personal and national prestige was caught up in the pound and the exchange rate. In July 1966, as Wilson announced a grim and conservative package of measures designed to take the pressure off, the pound was worth $2.80. Staggering. I just checked: it currently stands at $1.32.
This strand of ridiculous national pride in the currency persisted, of course, into the 21st century, and was the main reason many people resisted the very idea of joining the €uro. How much happier might we all be without the fookin’ pound?
Inevitably, the author spends a good deal of time on this matter, which was the most important issue trying the nation in the run-up to the release of Revolver, Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash, and the World Cup final at the Empire Stadium, Wembley.
We’re two thirds of the way through the book, Labour has just convincingly won the 1966 general election, and Kynaston takes stock.
When I saw him speak at the London Library last Wednesday, he was careful to emphasise that though the “Sixties” get seen as this revolutionary decade, it was also a decade of continuity. I’ve acknowledged this over and over again on this blog. Swinging London was a very small circle of hipsters who all knew each other, and you didn’t even have to leave London before you encountered what you might call the Long Fifties. Tradition. Continuity. Terrible food.
How many people still had an outdoor toilet? The answer: a lot. And what did people eat? Findus crispy pancakes, Vesta Chow Mein and fish fingers, yes, but also lots of tinned food. Corned beef (especially in the North East), but more chicken and fresh veg in the poncy South. Fish and chips, especially in the North, and marrowfat peas treated with bicarb to make them bright green.
By 1965, there were almost 13,000,000 motor vehicles in Britain, but still only 47% of journeys were taken by car; and as late as 1968 more than half of urban households did not own one. It’s easy to forget things like this. My dad used to drive terrible old second hand cars, but we did always have one, and a family holiday every summer. And we had a telephone, too, at a time when it was still common for people to come and knock on the door and ask to use it—when the payphone at the end of the street was out of order. And if you had a phone, you probably had a little wooden money box for such people to deposit coins in.
Other areas of continuity that the author identifies include betting shops and football grounds, greyhound stadia, and the working men’s clubs of northern England with their “turns”: comedians, jugglers, singers, and people eating pork pies and mushy peas.
He reminds us too that as well as the Kinks and the Stones and the Who, the charts were full of Mrs Mills and Ken Dodd—and that one of the most popular television shows was Val Doonican; and how Cliff Richard had more weeks on the charts than the Beatles; and how The Sound of Music was not just enormously popular in the cinema, but at number one in the album charts for 69 weeks.
And while the 60s was James Bond, it was also Carry On…; those films, with their seaside postcard humour, people putting up with things, grinning and bearing it all. Underneath all the seaside sauciness, Carry On films were puritanical in their attitudes towards sex. It wasn’t until 1967 when birth control advice was somewhat liberalised. 1966 was still the era when mostly only married women could access the pill, when Boots had only just started selling condoms, when most people’s idea of birth control was coitus interruptus. Heartbreaking tales of forced adoption.
And the book finishes with a tour de force of a final chapter. It’s the world cup final, and Kynaston weaves Kenneth Wolstenholme’s BBC commentary (in italics) with his usual semi-colon long-listing of what people were up to. Who was watching, who wasn’t. There were still garden fêtes, people working shifts, race meetings. That evening, lots of greyhound racing. And Bob Charlton senior is on his shift cutting coal at Linton Colliery while his two sons make history. Incredible.
It’s a powerful package, a blow-by-blow record from the sources and diarists as England make heavy weather of their match against West Germany. Laurence Marks has a bet on with a friend and needs England to lose. Peter Cook is in a pub or club (?) somewhere and his neighbour opens champagne a few minutes before the end of the 90 minutes (a classic “Nothing can go wrong now!” moment), with England 2:1 up. And then the Germans equalise, and, Peter Cook turns to his neighbour and says, “If you open your fucking mouth an extra time I’ll kill you.”
And just as I did when Mark Lewisohn reached the “You’ve just made your first number one record” moment in Tune In, I wept at Wolstenholme’s they think it’s all over.
An incredibly moving final chapter. Brilliant.
(According to what the author said last Wednesday, the next volume will cover late 1966 to early 1970. I’m already excited.)
Currently Reading
September 25, 2026Two chapters in and enjoying it very much. Kynaston has a talent, unlike any similar authors I've read, for giving the reader a true sense of what it was like to actually be there in the period he's writing about: there's a bit of political history, to be sure, but crucially there's a lot day-to-day activity which across even just the first two chapters builds an image of how the British lived at this time. Looking forward to the rest!
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