The Swinging Sixties

Jane Manning

We still call them the swinging 60's, a decade when the war was behind us finally and Britain was the trendiest place in the world. It was the time of The Beatles, Carnaby Street, Mods and Rockers, the Mini-both skirt and car. Life suddenly had colour again after the long war years.

Penguin Books decided to push back the barriers and publish D.H. Lawrence's notorious Lady Chatterley's Lover winning a head-on clash with the censor. It suddenly became OK with the establishment to use the kind of language that had previously only been heard in the mines, trenches and ships.

As the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961, the barriers of behaviour came tumbling down in Britain and the rest of the Western world. The 60's became notorious for the promotion of love, free or otherwise. All You Need Is Love sang The Beetles in July 1967 as they raced to the top of the charts yet again, followed a few weeks later by Scott McKenzie who urged us to go to San Francisco with flowers in our hair. Talking of hair-what about those beehive hairdos which made a girl a foot taller and an hour late - or the boyish Twiggy look in the latter part of the 60's. Twiggy supermodel stick insect was famous on both sides of the Atlantic and her career continues to this day although now she prefers acting.

Mersey mania reared it's head in the form of football, comedians like Jimmy Tarbuck and groups like The Beetles, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Cilla Black all of whom have survived to the 21st Century and still perform.

Other things that happened in the 60's? The QE2 made it's maiden voyage to New York in 1969, BBC2 hit the airwaves in 1964, Sir Francis Chichester sailed single-handedly around the world, the Rolling Stones played a concert to 250,000 fans in Hyde Park, Rupert Murdoch relaunched The Sun in 1969, breathalyser testing began in 1967 and there were amazing fashion changes. The British male could not believe his eyes when the mini-skirt arrived and the British female could not believe her nerve for wearing it. It even became trendy to wear see-through clothes, topless dresses and to burn bras.

Men too had their own fashions. Jackets without lapels, shoes as sharp as daggers and fur-collared anoraks became essential wear. Mods hit the road on scooters-Vespa's and Lambretta with enough chrome to dazzle. Maybe they had more buzz than roar but if a few hundred of them passed you on the road to Brighton, you knew it would be a good idea to turn round and go home! Rockers on the other hand were king of the greasy-spoon café and roamed the roads on their throaty-throttled motorbikes.

The other trendy form of transport was the Mini. For less than £500 you could drive away a new car that would do twice as much to the gallon as most of the other vehicles on the road. You could park it easily anywhere and look very chic at the new-fangled parking meters springing up in the West End of London. If you really wanted to show off there was the Mini-Cooper, which could leave your average Ford Escort standing at any traffic lights. Colour television arrived-what did we watch? Coronation Street started in December 1960. It caught on! In 1964 Crossroads started-24 years and some really dodgy acting it went off our screens only to be brought back in 2001, which is real progress! We also had Peyton Place, The Beverley Hillbillies, Ready Steady Go and Z-Cars.

At the cinema we saw a string of dreadful Elvis films, which competed against a string of Cliff Richard films. James Bond was launched and Sean Connery gave up delivering the milk to become an international film star. The radio pirates like became respectable and joined the BBC as Radio 1 and back then it was really good. Holidays were still mainly spent in Britain, which seemed to bask in continuous sunshine! But Benidorm and Majorca soon became popular as the Med became easier to reach.

In the 60's if you earned £20 a week you were doing well and you probably only earned about £10. You could buy a house for £1000, a newspaper for a penny and a decent bar of chocolate for 3d(1.5p) You could buy a season ticket for your favourite team for a fiver and British football boomed. beginning probably with England winning the World Cup in 1966. It was a crazy decade, with flower power, hippies,CND marches and coffee bars. Really trendy places were The Bastille, The Macabre and the Two I's on Soho or your corner Lyons.

I know you are wondering why President Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe and Man landing on the moon to name have not been mentioned here-well dear reader that will be another story!

It doesn't matter for the moment and that was the joy of the 60's-nothing really mattered at all! .