Indecent and crude! When even Cliff Richard was branded a moral danger

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Concluding our compelling series on the dramatic transformation that Britain underwent in the final years of the Fifties, David Kynaston reveals how rock ’n’ roll horrified traditionalists — and why the first Tory minister who dared to speak up for benefits cuts had to resign.

A sweltering Saturday in July, and it was ideal weather for the annual church fete (‘tickets 2/-, refreshments at moderate prices’) on the field behind St Peter’s Church, Woolton, on the outskirts of Liverpool.
Standing on a makeshift stage, a skiffle group performed that afternoon, led by a tousled 16-year-old wearing a checked shirt and tight black jeans. ‘It was the first day I did “Be-Bop-a-Lula” live onstage,’ he would remember 23 years later.
His name? John Lennon. And this was the day, in 1957, that he first met Paul McCartney. ‘A mutual friend brought him to see my group,’ recalled Lennon. ‘He was playing guitar backstage and doing “Twenty Flight Rock” by Eddie Cochran.

Rock and roll beginnings: John Lennon playing with the Quarry Men at St Peter's church fete, Woolton, Merseyside, on July 6 1957

‘I saw he had talent and I turned round to him right then on first  meeting  and said, “Do you want to join the group?” and he said, “Um, hmm, hmm de hmm”,  and I think he said yes the next day.’
A month later, The Quarry Men (without McCartney) played for the first time at the Cavern in Liverpool. ‘We did some skiffle to start, but we also did rock ’n’ roll,’ recalled the drummer that night, Colin Hanton.

‘John Lennon was passed a note and, very pleased, he said to the audience: “We’ve had a request.” He opened it up and it was from Alan, the club’s cantankerous owner, saying, “Cut out the bloody rock ’n’ roll.”’ 
It was a view shared by a large number of older viewers of the BBC, who had reacted with dismay to a new music and entertainment programme, the Six-Five Special, which followed the evening news in a slot that had formerly seen all TV programmes suspended for an hour by a Government-imposed edict known as ‘the Toddler’s Truce’ — designed to allow parents to put their children to bed without distraction.
Aimed firmly at the teenage viewer, the new show was hosted by two distinctly non-teenage presenters, Pete Murray and Josephine Douglas, who announced ‘we’ve got almost 100 cats jumping here, some real cool characters to give us a gas’ — helpfully translating for any ‘squares’ watching as meaning ‘we’ve got some lively musicians and personalities mingling with us here, so relax and catch the mood’.
The subsequent feedback from BBC audience research found ‘plenty of evidence to show that the older the viewer the less he (or she) enjoyed this programme’ adding that many found it ‘quite intolerably noisy’.

Changing tides: Paul McCartney (left) making his debut public performance with The Quarry Men, led by John Lennon (centre), at the Conservative club, in Liverpool

The Press, too, gave a mixed verdict. The Daily Telegraph confirmed all the instinctive prejudices of its  readers: ‘A hundred “cats” were let loose on unsuspecting viewers’ reported its critic. ‘Grim-faced, many of them oddly dressed in tight trousers, they jived and did their dervish dances to loud brassy noises.’
But rock ’n’ roll was on a roll. Elsewhere that summer, 11-year-old Helen Shapiro first met ten-year-old  Mark Feld (later Marc Bolan) — a ‘chubby  kid’ with a quiff. They later performed together in a school band called Susie and the Hula Hoops before going their separate ways — she to rise to teen stardom as the singer of such wholesome classics as Walkin’ Back To Happiness; he to become the front man for the rather edgier T Rex.
Another 11-year-old, Bob Harris (later of Old Grey Whistle fame) was on holiday with his parents in Cromer when he passed an amusement arcade and heard Paul Anka’s Diana coming from the jukebox. ‘There was,’ he recalled, ‘a magic to it that made me want to be part of the world it came from’.

Elvis impersonator: Cliff Richard's performance was described by the New Musical Express as 'violent hip-swinging and crude exhibitionism'

At Butlin’s, Clacton-on-Sea, 17-year-old Cliff Richard — described as ‘a dark-haired, dark-eyed singer and guitar twanger’ — and his backing group The Drifters (later The Shadows) began a residency at the Pig and Whistle Bar in 1958.
They’d been put in the wrong bar and were a flop. ‘Campers went there for a knees-up,’ recalled a red coat. ‘They thought Cliff’s music was a racket and no one went in when he was playing.
‘Cliff only knew about eight numbers, all Elvis Presley songs. He used to look like Elvis, and wiggle in the same way.’
Later that summer, he had his first Top 20 hit single with Move It, a rock ’n’ roll number written specially for him. It was featured in Oh Boy!, ITV’s fast-paced response to the BBC’s Six-Five Special. Producer Jack Good saw Cliff as his trump card in the battle for ratings.
‘Jack created Cliff Richard,’ recalled the singer half-a-century later. ‘He didn’t want an Elvis lookalike, so off came the sideburns, away went the guitar, and in came the sneer, the curled lip and that sultry look up at the camera. I was 100 per cent directed by him.’
Not that the pouting young Cliff was everyone’s cup of tea. ‘Violent hip-swinging and crude exhibitionism,’ the New Musical Express called his performing style, adding tartly: ‘Tommy Steele became Britain’s teenage idol without resorting to this indecent vulgarity’.

Also making his name was one Des O’Connor, who in the spring of 1958 supplied the gags and linked the acts in a tour of Britain headed by the legendary Buddy Holly and the Crickets, from the U.S.
Among the audience at the 6.45 early-evening show at the Woolwich Granada was a grammar schoolboy from Dartford, attending his first concert. Known as ‘Mike’ then, the ‘cool’ 14-year-old looked bored as the Crickets tuned up.
But long before the end of the show, Mick Jagger was — according to a biographer — ‘clapping along, out of his seat, hair puffing over his eyes, miming the lyrics. Together, the Rolling Stones and The Beatles would provide the dominant soundtrack to the coming decade, as the old moral order was overturned and youth culture was at the vanguard of a liberalising social agenda whose effects are still with us today, for better and for worse.
Debates often rage about when the Sixties truly began. While it may be too fanciful to suggest it was at that Liverpool church fete where Lennon met McCartney, there’s no doubt that without that small seed, the coming era would not have bloomed in quite the same way.
If British pop was on the brink of a revolution, then in Westminster a seismic political upheaval was underway. On the first Monday of 1958, all three ministers at the Treasury resigned — a unique event in 20th-century British political history.

Principles: Peter Thorneycroft was an out-and-out free-marketeer with an instinctive faith in enterprise

They did so on an issue familiar to us more than half-a-century later — whether the country (and more particularly its Tory leadership) had the nerve to cut welfare spending and give the free market its head.
There were also those among the Tory rank-and-file — the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ of their day, perhaps? — who wondered whether those in high places hadn’t lost sight of what being a Conservative really meant.
The story had begun a year earlier when Harold Macmillan, the new prime minister, picked his Treasury team of Peter Thorneycroft as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Enoch Powell as Financial Secretary and Nigel Birch as Economic Secretary.
The 47-year-old old Etonian Thorneycroft was an out-and-out free-marketeer with an instinctive faith in enterprise and hard work and a distrust of social security benefits, state subsidies and schemes to protect the unemployed.
Within weeks of his appointment in January 1957, Thorneycroft was taking a hard, unyielding line. The government, he told his Cabinet colleagues, ‘spends too much, drifts into inflation, then seeks to cure the situation by fiscal and budgetary measures’.

Party problems: Prime Minister Harold Macmillan suspected that his chancellor Peter Thorneycroft wanted more swingeing cuts to welfare

Many people in respectable ‘middle England’ — natural Tory voters — shared his sentiments. They were perturbed by what they saw as excessive taxation and the unacceptably high cost of maintaining the welfare state, the burden of which they felt fell on them.
‘We have worked hard and saved all our lives, and the worry of modern conditions may yet drive us into a mental institution,’ an anguished couple in their 60s wrote to the Birmingham Mail.
‘Can’t the government, who do everything for the lazy and extravagant, do something for the thrifty and careful? They’ll take most of what we have left when we die, anyhow.’
In Barrow, a neighbour of housewife Nella Last was also up in arms. ‘Mrs Atkinson was in a “militant” mood,’ she recorded in her diary. ‘She said it was time the welfare state got working smoother & not throwing money about.’ Mrs Atkinson was particularly cross about a widow living nearby who was ‘never economising’ and was getting her rent and rates paid.
‘It’s a queer world,’ Last wrote later. ‘No wonder there’s unrest & discontent [because] no one seems to have the idea of standing on their own! I hear grumbles from OAPs & mothers drawing allowances, as if they feel there’s a bottomless purse for the government to draw on, & it’s their right to have an increasing share!’
Back in Whitehall, such attitudes sent shudders through Thorneycroft. He feared an economic crash unless state spending was kept in check. He also wanted quick and firm action to hold down pay. ‘The source of our inflationary disease is wages increasing out of all proportion to increases in production,’ he declared.
In September 1957 he announced a substantial rise in interest rates from 5 per cent to 7 per cent (to shore up the international value of the pound) and a two-year standstill in public-sector investment. ‘There can be no remedy for inflation that is not founded upon a control of the money supply,’ he declared.
But others already saw the pitfalls. Just before Christmas, Macmillan had a long talk with Thorneycroft, noting that ‘the Chancellor wants some swingeing cuts in welfare state expenditure — more, I fear, than is feasible politically’.
As the new year began, Thorneycroft put in a new demand — that, in addition to an agreed £100 million of cuts in civil and defence expenditure, a further £50 million of savings had to be found. Some of this was to come from abolishing family allowance for the second child.
He found himself isolated in Cabinet, and an aggrieved Macmillan wrote next day: ‘Thorneycroft behaved in such a rude & cassant [Fr for brittle] way that I had difficulty in preventing some of the Cabinet bursting out in their indignation.’
The prime minister brooded over the weekend and increasingly came to the view that the ‘cynical’ Nigel Birch and especially the ‘fanatical’ Enoch Powell’ were ‘egging [Thorneycroft] on’.
But if Macmillan was hoping Thorneycroft would come off his high horse and see sense, he was disappointed. The next day, Thorneycroft quit. He had been Chancellor for 51 weeks. In his letter of resignation, he declared that ‘the government must accept the same measure of financial discipline as it seeks to impose on others’, and referred to the need for ‘politically unpopular courses’.

Friction: The Prime Minister Macmillan believed a 'cynical' Nigel Birch was 'egging on' Peter Thorneycroft

Powell and Birch went, too, though Thorneycroft had told them they didn’t have to. Both men, however, were just as determined to draw a line in the sand. 
Birch’s resignation letter stressed even more emphatically the pressing need for government expenditure to be reduced. ‘Painful and distasteful’ as such cuts might be, he added, ‘the electorate is more likely to forgive us for taking measures which they know in their heart are right than for lacking in courage and clear thinking.’
Macmillan was unmoved as he acted true to form. An Old Etonian himself, he replaced the Old Etonian Thorneycroft at No. 11 Downing Street with another Old Etonian, Derick Heathcoat Amory.
Then he dismissed the whole affair, with typical urbanity and understatement, as ‘a little local difficulty’, a phrase that, by pretending to make light of the whole issue, passed into political folklore as a triumph of style over substance.
When Gallup produced its opinion-poll findings, they showed that 42 per cent of all voters sided with Thorneycroft in wanting tougher economic measures and 20 per cent with Macmillan. Among specifically Tory voters, 36 per cent plumped for Macmillan, compared with 33 per cent for Thorneycroft.

Power struggle: Enoch Powell resigned in protest at the government's refusal to push through more spending cuts

Yet among those same Tory voters, 69 per cent agreed that government expenditure, including defence and social services, should be cut back in order to fulfil the government’s first duty of fighting inflation and preserving the value of the pound. Only 13 per cent disagreed. How to explain the difference between the two Tory sets of figures? Partly it must have been a combination of personal faith in Macmillan and tribal loyalty to the party leadership. But there was also a certain innate reluctance to think things through.
Parliament reassembled towards the end of January to hear Thorneycroft’s resignation speech. His conclusion was stirring: ‘I believe there is an England that would prefer to face these facts and make the necessary decisions now. I believe that living within our resources is neither unfair nor unjust, nor perhaps, in the long run, even unpopular.’ 
The Tory benches cheered Thorneycroft to the echo. Then they went on to vote solidly for the government and against the principles on which he had insisted to the point of resignation.
Watching from the press gallery, Mollie Panter-Downes — who wrote a regular ‘Letter From London’ for the New Yorker magazine — was ‘bewildered’. But this, she concluded, was typical of the ‘gentlemanly oddities of the British political system’, with everyone ‘somewhat confused as to who was hitting whom among all the congratulatory Conservative handshakes’.
In the fullness of time, Thorneycroft and his co-resigners would be portrayed as proto-Thatcherite martyrs. And so they were, as, over the years, the Conservatives shifted to their way of thinking.
Two decades later, when Mrs Thatcher became party leader, she made him her party chairman . . . just as a young boy from a well-to-do Berkshire family was settling into life at Heatherdown, a boarding school near Ascot.
His name? David Cameron.

•  Modernity Britain: Opening The Box 1957-1959 by David Kynaston, to be published by Bloomsbury on June 20 at £25. © 2013 David Kynaston. To order a copy for £18.99 (inc p&p), call 0844 472 4157.