The anger and dissent of 1950s when writers burned bright

The Festival was certainly a Modern project ushering in alternative accounts of life in the 1950s, and articulating some discontent about the slowness and direction of change; there was more frustration, anger and dissent into the 1950s, including fears about the future.

I want to discuss here the form that some of that anger and dissent took, particularly the emergence of a wave of regional novelists, playwrights, film makers and musicians.

I would call the late 1950s into the early 1960s a ‘Golden Age’ of the regional arts, of youngish people who were determined to have a voice, to demand agency in their lives.

A sense of freedom of action, to insist on a break from the Arts Establishment, and to offer an alternative account of everyday life and whose values mattered.

This became a ‘cultural revolt’ that was to change ideas in the UK.

The novels and plays that emerged from Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Stan Barstow, Shelagh Delaney, Keith Waterhouse, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and Harold Pinter amongst many others in this era, reflected this anger and frustration with a sense of having their social, psychological and cultural ‘tail trapped in the door’. Some of this ‘literary’ creativity ended up on Film.

Many of these ‘new’ writers were working in education, and had a better education themselves, more extensive than their parents, as a consequence of post-war reforms to schooling. Changes in life circumstances, opportunities, and goals created many tensions between generations. Residual values to hold on to, but a different way of seeing the future, for their-selves and society.

In many varied ways this arts practice articulated concerns about the future of everyday life faced with significant changes in lifestyle; to local communities, the increasing Americanisation of popular culture, and the impact of an increasingly aggressive consumer culture, focused on the acquisition of ‘things’. The growth of a ‘Mass Culture’.

The outstanding observer of this time was Richard Hoggart, who, drawing on his own early working class community life in Yorkshire, explored the growing significance of ‘Mass Culture’ in his book ‘The Uses of Literacy’ (1957). Published in Pelican (Penguin) in 1958, my later copy has a picture by L.S.Lowry on the front cover!

Essentially Hoggart’s concern was focused on the potential and actual uses to which this post 1945 literacy was put, more education for what?

For an example of these issues I would turn Alan Sillitoe, born into a working class Nottingham family in 1928. His father worked in cycle making factory in Nottingham, where fourteen year old Alan was to go on leaving school, the conventual age. He had many jobs, did his compulsory national service and starting writing, eventually having two books published in 1958/9; ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘The Loneliness of the long-distance runner’. Both had film versions made (1960 and 1962) with Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay respectively. John Dankworth composed and played the music for ‘Saturday Night…’. These books and films were big hits, and opened up a panorama of everyday life and loves for a range of people whose existence had never rarely been explored and discussed so much. Of course D.H.Lawrence (1885-1930) along with many other authors had explored such lives and communities before, but had not become as far-reaching and popular as Sillitoe and his post 1945 contemporaries.

Hoggart’s argument was that this new generation of ‘artists’ had the ‘mass media’ for the context to popular cultures development, especially more TV for all, after ITV arrived in 1955. Rent a TV from your local Granada shop and watch ‘Play of the Week’ to match up with the BBC’s ‘Play for Today’. These social and technological developments led to Dennis Potter and others, a reinforcement of these changes.