: Matthew Engel
: The Way It Was Life in Elizabeth's Britain, 1952-79
: Atlantic Books
: 9781786496683
: 1
: CHF 7.60
:
: Regional- und Ländergeschichte
: English
: 640
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
She came to the throne in 1952 when Britain had a far-flung empire, sweets were rationed, mums stayed home and kids played on bombsites. Seventy years on, everything has changed utterly - except the Queen herself, ageing far more gracefully than the fractious nation over which she so lightly presides. How did we get from there to here in a single reign? To cancel culture, anti-vaxxers and Twitter feeds? Matthew Engel tells the story - starting with the years from Churchill to Thatcher - with his own light touch and a wealth of fascinating, forgotten, often funny detail.

Matthew Engel is a journalist and author. He has written for the Guardian and Financial Times, among other publications, and was the editor of the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack for twelve years. His books include Eleven Minutes Late and Engel's England.

1


WIVES AND SERVANTS


ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1960, A YOUNG MAN CALLED JOHN ‘HOPPY’ Hopkins arrived in London to make a new start. He was 22 and a graduate of Cambridge, where he had studied general science, jazz, drugs and sex, not necessarily in that order. For a while, he worked as a technician for the Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell before taking a holiday at a Communist youth festival and, not surprisingly, losing his security clearance.

He brought his camera and soon found a job as an assistant to a commercial photographer. ‘It was heaven,’ he said. He also found himself welcome in the scattered pockets of louche subversiveness that were starting to emerge in the run-down areas of West London.

Photographers had little status in the 1950s. At a function, one dared to approach Betty Kenward, the absurd figure whose ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ column inTatler (and thenQueen) fawningly chronicled upper-crust social life. ‘My photographers never speak to me at parties,’ she snapped imperiously. In February 1960 this upstart, Jones or something, became engaged to Princess Margaret. In the springtime they were married in Westminster Abbey amid full palaver, complete with Richard Dimbleby TV commentary, and Antony Armstrong-Jones went on to become Earl of Snowdon.*

The marriage, by chance, resembled a medieval dynastic alliance. It linked the royal family with Bohemia, or at least the London versions of it like Fitzrovia, Notting Hillia (now up-and-coming) and Rotherhithia, where Armstrong-Jones rented his bachelor flat.

And thus indirectly with John Hopkins. Photographers were about to join the elite. Snowdon was to be closely associated with the pioneeringSunday Times magazine, launched in 1962; Hopkins took much-admired photos of the rock scene and the capital’s underbelly. He also became a major figure in what would become aggrandized as Britain’s counterculture, and for a while was what the music producer Joe Boyd called ‘the closest thing the movement ever had to a leader’.

That was about five years away, which was a long, long time in the 1960s. There is still endless debate about when the sixties, as a concept, began. Any date between 1956 and 1963 might be defensible. But 1 January 1960, and Hoppy’s arrival, is at least one possibility.