The end of innocence

THE YEAR 1963 was a momentous one.

Andrew Cook, who will publish a book entitled 1963: That Was the Year That Was next month, says the average year has two or three big news stories; in 1963, there were more than 30: the graphic self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in Saigon, a harbinger of horrors to come in Vietnam; the Moors Murders; Valentina Tereshkova — the first woman in space; Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech; and the release of Dr No, the first James Bond movie, among them. The year also marked the end of innocence.

“It’s a real watershed year,” says Cook. “Preconceptions about life were shattered. The average person in 1963 would never have questioned that British intelligence would sell out their country. That year there were a whole string of intelligence scandals where moles — such as Kim Philby — betrayed the Ministry of Defence.

“What was more disturbing was that a lot of these people were from the upper class. People could understand how someone could be tempted with bribes but these people — well-off, landed gentry who’d been to Cambridge — weren’t doing it for money, they were doing it because they allegedly believed in Marxism. Why were they selling their country out? This was an enormous jolt.

“It sounds funny these days but in 1963 people would never have thought that a politician could go on national television, look at the camera, and tell a lie. People believed what politicians told them. In 1963, John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, stood up in the House of Commons, a bit like Bill Clinton, and said, ‘I’ve never had a relationship with this woman Christine Keeler.’ That was the beginning of the end in terms of public confidence in institutions.”

Most people who remember President John F Kennedy’s death in November 1963 were numb with shock when they heard about it. It was so unsettling in Britain, says Cook, that ITV and BBC switched off television — people sat watching a blank TV for half an hour until the broadcasters got themselves together and put out an announcement. The general public presumed the president of the United States was untouchable.

“The assassination had two effects,” says Cook. “It destroyed the purity people had that changes didn’t happen out of the blue. Things like World War II came along, but people could see that coming, it had been predicted five or six years before it happened, but with something like the Kennedy assassination and suddenly the whole world is turned upside down in a few seconds.

“It also gave birth to something we still suffer from these days, which is the conspiracy movement. You could write several books about conspiracy theories that are complete bunkum. It’s a sad fact that over 50% of Americans believe the moon landing never happened. That’s because of the conspiracy movement that sprang up in ’63. You’re either forced to believe that an ordinary, disturbed individual like Lee Harvey Oswald walked up to a window, picked up a rifle and turned history on its head, or you say, ‘I can’t believe it; there must be more to it. It must be a government conspiracy. It must be the CIA or Cuba.’

“Either you believe a complete nonentity can change the course of history by being in the right place at the right time or you accept another disturbing scenario that the world is full of conspiracies and governments are plotting against their own peoples and assassinating their own leaders. Whichever fork in the road you go down, you end up with a very unstable frame of mind.”

People in Ireland and Britain also endured the coldest winter for nearly 300 years. The sea froze, points out Cook, for a mile out from shore at Herne Bay in Kent at the end of January that year. The number of people dying from run-of-the-mill illnesses increased. Few houses — let alone cars — had central heating, and because of the freezing of fuel, the roads were littered with abandoned cars. Disposable nappies were a rare, expensive luxury; because of frozen pipes, water to wash nappies had to be fetched (usually by women) by trudging with a bucket through snow several times a day.

Cook was four years old and living “a stone’s throw” from Bridgego Bridge, the scene of the Great Train Robbery in August 1963. The case, particularly the evidence he uncovered by chipping away at hundreds of secret state files over the last few years, intrigues him.

The bare bones of the heist are fascinating — a 17-man team of crooks; months of planning; the inevitable man on the inside, the ‘Ulsterman’; a 3am raid on the mail train, which had 77 postmen, a driver, who was badly bludgeoned, a fireman and one guard on board; the booty, more than £2 million in used bills split evenly; and four men who have never been caught.

Elements of the hunt to catch the criminals remind Cook of the shenanigans in the Cold War games of the era. Similar to a global intelligence battle full of double agents, both sides involved in the Great Train Robbery knew what the other was up to.

“It’s very evident from these files, that the police knew very quickly exactly who was involved, what had gone on, right down to the last detail. They knew this because they had high-placed ‘grasses’, police informers, spilling the beans. Equally the criminals had a number of corrupt senior police officers in their pockets, telling them what the police were doing, which was one of the reasons you get this Keystone Kops, cat-and-mouse game.

“For example, within five minutes of the decision to put Buster Edwards’s photograph up on TV, someone had rung Edwards and told him, so when the police raided his house the kettle was still warm and they wondered how come he had evacuated his house so quickly before his picture went on TV. It just went round and round in circles.”

Beatlemania also swept the land in 1963. The Beatles recorded their debut album — Please Please Me — in a single session in February 1963.

By the end of the year, the band had broken the stranglehold of American artists on the music charts, hitting Number 1 three times between September and December. Their canny manager, Brian Epstein, who took 25% cut of their takings, marketed them at the female 13-to-17 age demographic, a largely untapped consumer group. Most girls in Britain were leaving school at 15 years of age so they had disposable income to lavish on the four Liverpudlians with the mod suits and the pudding-bowl haircuts. Meanwhile, the effect of their music left parents in despair.

“We must offer teenagers something they will like better... it has a hypnotic effect on them,” warned MP Henry Price in the House of Commons.

“Their eyes become glazed, their hands wobble loosely and their legs wobble just as loosely at the knees. This is known as ‘being sent’.”

Andrew Cook’s 1963: That Was the Year That Was is published by The History Press.