I don't hate the 60s! Honest.

 

 Has anyone noticed the backlash against the 1960s recently?
 I once read a book, about ten years ago, that was about the 60s, and it began 'the 1960s are perhaps the most mythologised decade of all time'. Which I agreed with. However, in the last ten years or so, there's been something in the Zeitgeist that wants to re-evaluate the 60s, to explore it's dark side.
 I have to confess an interest. I love the 60s. When I somehow get hold of a time machine, that's where I'm going for a holiday. Youth culture and pop culture in general had an energy to it that's been lacking ever since, which is probably why it's been so romanticised. Woodstock, man landing on the moon, hippies - there was an innocent exuberance, which to our older culture can be charming. The 60s had an energy for change, but in a positive way.
 However, that would be to ignore the flip side of the coin, which is where this backlash is coming from in the first place. As a society, we can only ignore the dreadfulness of the 1960s for so long before it becomes decade-worship. The civil rights and feminist movements were a cornerstone of the 1960s, rightfully so, but they were the forced result of a culture that essentially punished you for not being male and white. The 60s could easily be a very dangerous time if you weren't part of that subset of the population. The 'establishment' that young people railed against was an oppressive regime that had had a long experience of silencing dissent. During the 1960s, most people were still aware of their place in society and knew to keep their heads down.

Kent state shooting

 Protests against the Vietnam war highlight the awful reality of actually having been around back then. Protests and demonstrations turned violent, and of course there was the Kent State shootings. The cold war had produced enough nuclear weapons for the repeated annihilation of all life on Earth, either by madness or by accident, and although protest was widepsread it was ignored.

JFK

 In Britain, to deal with the housing crisis, tower blocks had been enthusiastically built. However, the premise was flawed - tower blocks don't allow you to simply pile up indefinitely, there needs to be quite a lot of surrounding to space to let in light to the bottom and in case the things collapse like dominoes, so you might as well build normal 2-up 2-downs - the huge subsidises hidden, and whole commnuities were seperated. The pound lowered in value, and it became common for young men to go abroad for work. Britain in the 60s could be very, very, depressing.
 So why, then, has it been so mythologised? Why does our culture shy away from the bad side? Well, it could be that youth culture of the time is so appealing. Their fashions were ridiculous (but perfect for fancy dress), some of their beliefs were well-meaning but stupidly flawed (e.g free love, or no politics in the communes), it could be that they did amazing stuff in that decade (man on the moon, sexual and civil equal rights, forcing society out of its rigid old mentality), or maybe it's just that we would all like to outrage an older generation that we're outraging with our outragessness.
 None of these feel right. In my opinion, the 1960s are glamourised just because there was the mood of change. They had come out of the bland conformist 50s and the feeling was that they were making a much better, more interesting, society. Wages had been rising, young people had a lot more disposable income, and some more time before society expected them to settle down. We miss the feeling that things are getting better. We live in a world where politicians advertise themselves as managers of the economy, not changers of society. I lived through the birth of the internet, which was perhaps the biggest change to our society since the 1960s, but nobody really got excited about it. It just happened a bit at a time. Maybe this explains our new-found antipathy to the 60s - we know, deep down, that the opening years of the 21st century just won't be eulogised anything like the 60s.

The 25th of October

 On this day, the British attacked the Russian guns in Balaclava on what would inspire the poem 'the charge of the light brigade' byTennyson, a poem that simultaneously praises the brigade whilst mourning the futility of the charge, whilst also criticising the leaders (but in that Victorian way of not naming names).
 The Crimean war was one that had a lasting effect on the British public. This was the war that made a name of Florence Nightingale, the nurse and writer and statistician who ran a reform campaign to improve the conditions of sanitation in hosptials.

 Curiously, for an event that was so influential on the media of the time, and has remained in our collective memory as a result, I was only able to find two films about it (both called The charge of the light brigade). Apparently the 1936 version is much more historically innacurate than the 1968 version, but that was the intention of the screenwriter as it had based it on research done into the battle,and he had aimed to be realistic. And Britain in the 60s had a strange kind of fascination with the Victorian (and Edwardian) era,probably because it felt quite far away in time but still also quite close - the Empire might have ended in the 50s, but Britain would still be living with the legacy of empire for decades to come; not just in terms of international relations, but also re-defining what Britain was. In the 1960s, it was obvious that the sun had set, but it was still a part of culture, and I think this confusion can be seen in the pop culture of the 60s - interest in the past, but also a reinvention of British icons as something that definitely didn't represent an empire.

Coatbridge in the past.

 Glasgow is awesome. I say that as a Glaswegian, and as a historian. Glasgow has had a decades-long belief in council-funded museums and arts, so that entrance is free. Now, I know that Coatbridge isn't Glasgow, but it's about five miles outside of Glasgow, and it has an excellent free museum.

 It's the Summerlee Heritage Musuem. I used to go there as a kid, and what's astonishing that - despite cosmetic changes - a lot of the original exhibits from the 1980s are still there! Coatbridge is an ex-mining and steel-making town, that contributed significantly to empire, and in the 19th century saw a massive influx of immigrants looking for work in the mines and steel-mills. It's one of those places where you just know it did a lot of mining - everywhere seems to be built on a hill. Coatbridge suffered heavily from the loss of mining, and the twentieth century saw Coatbridge go into serious decline. But, there are still marks and memorials to its robust past, and this museum is one that's been going for decades.


This is next to the tram stop. Yes, trams! They are so cool. This was taken during a beautiful summer day, when they have the double-decker 1930s tram out. As you can see, it's not 100% authentic - there isn't a smog so bad that you can't see 10 feet in front of you. But it's like a gentrified vrsion of being in the past.








 There are a row of houses, each one showing what a working-class house was like at different periods in history. This is Scotland in the 1960s. The TV is showing an old b/w advert for a washing spin-drier. It was intensely patronising to all women everywhere!





 Scotland in the 1940s. The radio was playing the songs that would've been on in the 1940s, some Judy Garland and Sing Sing Sing, when I was there. No Kenneth Horne, I'm afraid.









 I really like this kind of history, it's a history that is as remote as the famous stuff that happened in the same period, but it feels connected and approachable. It's the history of people who would've laughed that their way of life was of any interest to the people of the future, and it's this lack of inhibition about having an eye on the future that makes their lives and their motivations all the more fascinating. Also, these two houses were from the 1940s and the 1960s, two decades that the British have mythologised, which is why we find things like this quite charming.

 Oh, and two more things about Coatbridge..Madeline Smith's lover Emile L'Angelier spent his last day having a pub lunch in Coatbridge, in an area of Coatbridge called Whifflet. And, in Drumpellier, remains of stone-age settlements were found.