On The Cusp by David Kynaston
Kynaston has been producing a magisterial set of historical books about British life that started in 1945 at the end of the European war. This impressive series of books, known as ‘Tales of a New Jerusalem’, uses a range of sources mixing accounts of great public events with the daily lives of ordinary Britons. His aim is to reveal how we got from there, with its hope of major, fundamental change after six bruising years of hardship and sacrifice, to 1979 with the country poised on the verge of another seismic national shift.
His most recent book from this series, ‘A Northern Wind’ released in 2023, covers the period 1962-65. ‘On the Cusp’, though, was published in 2021 and takes a different approach from the other ‘Tales of a New Jerusalem’: it is a slim volume focusing on just one year in the life of our nation. It was produced during covid and can perhaps be seen as a warm up exercise to keep himself agile for weightier analysis. However, this would be to underestimate what he is trying to do with this book. As the title suggests, he sees 1962 as a seminal year when there were discernible signs of change in the way we were governed, the way we perceived ourselves and felt about some of the certainties of post war life. It is no surprise that this was a year when the baby boomers were moving towards young adulthood and perhaps saw their future as being defined by something other than the shadow of two world wars. It was the year which Kynaston characterises as the real start of the 1960s when The Beatles moved from a little-known Cavern club band to a cultural sensation and when Dr. No, the first James Bond film, was released. Both marked a radically different image of what it meant to be British.
Kynaston admits that this book is a snapshot which does not claim to be comprehensive. In fact, it seems more like a tidying up exercise that gives time to areas of British life that are slightly marginalised in his ‘Tales of a New Jerusalem’. So, for example, we get a detailed focus on the nature of agricultural jobs and communities, especially in Wales. This may sound a little dry but actually is the reverse. That’s partly because Kynaston explores the ramifications for ordinary people via a variety of telling details. The narrative in any particular section is composed, for example, of newspaper stories, reports of cabinet discussions, mass observation records, advertisements, cultural references and diary entries from celebrities such as Kenneth Williams alongside those from housewives and office drones.
His great skill is to bring together all these different accounts and reflections on this year of teeming events in an artless way that, at first reading, seems to simply lay them out for the reader. He asks you to take them all in and decide if you agree with his casually expressed view that during 1962 Britain was changing from a staid, stolid society into a modern country, with characteristics still prevalent in the 21st century. Of course, things are not that artless and casual. There is a subtle guiding principle in the way he groups his details in the six themed chapters. It is not difficult for the reader to discern a sympathy for the energy of the young, as well as the pushing at traditional limitations by the better educated working class. Yet, alongside that, Kynaston understands and gives space to the anxieties of the older generations who see certainties around their communities, including the growing multiculturalism of the country, gradually evolving. There is distrust of those guiding those changes – not just politicians but architects, the industrial, managerial class and the aristocratic taste makers to identify just a few. And it is not too big a leap to say that Kynaston is also pointing out echoes of the division and mistrust in the first decades of this century – the economic crash, Brexit, the response to covid which are all symptoms of a similar societal splintering that was on the cusp in 1962.
Most reviews of this book comment on the variety and the liveliness of Kynaston’s account of 1962. I think that is right. The contemporary accounts of what was in the news, what was on the telly and at the cinema, what people drove, ate, and so on was rather like a thrilling novel with an almost unbelievable plot. The year itself is the star, though, because each telling event seemed to be reflected and amplified elsewhere – for example, the dramatic falling apart of MacMillan’s government after a decade of Tory rule was matched by the final Gentlemen V Players fixture at Lords and the emergence of new sorts of cultural heroes.
I’ve said elsewhere that we always think that the age we are currently living through is somehow seminal in the development of our world, or at the very least emblematic of important change. Kynaston makes a good case that this notion might just be true for 1962.