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By Root 1531 0

on the game who could earn a few hundred pounds in a few hours on the street – good money in the 1950s – and take off for a quick holiday in Morocco, among the conscious rejecters of traditional middle-class conventions, such as Ken Tynan, or among the middle-aged bourgeois insiders asserting outsider status by drinking sessions in the watering-hole of the painter Francis Bacon, Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club in Frith Street, Soho. Not that Muriel’s mostly homosexual crowd was particularly jazz-oriented, although I was introduced into this shabby first-floor room by an admiring reviewer of The Jazz Scene, and was quite likely to meet Colin MacInnes there, who praised jazz but did not understand it, and George Melly, who sang it and did. Melly was part of a fringe of the British jazz scene made up of refugees from middle-class respectability or people who combined their music with activities in the world of words and images. To the fans he was known as a self-parodying blues singer close to a music-hall act, as Wally Fawkes was known as a clarinet player. In the straight world both were much better known as the joint creators of a highly popular strip-cartoon which gently satirized the recognizable members of what was not yet known as the media world.

The third change, this one more readily recognized, was the change in the political or ideological mood after 1956. I can now see that the new factor that brought it about was the end of empires, but in Britain this did not become clear until the 1960s.

The Cold War remained, but, outside western governments, the public’s commitment to an emotional anti-communism began to decline. However much it was denounced, from 1960 the Berlin Wall stabilized the frontier between superpower empires in Europe, neither of which was seriously expected to cross it. We still lived under the black cloud of nuclear apocalypse. It came close in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and in 1963 Stanley Kubrick produced its definitive version, the film Doctor Strangelove – but by then it could already be played for laughs, however black. But CND, the new Campaign for (unilateral British) Nuclear Disarmament (1959), by far the largest public mobilization of the British left, was not intended to, and plainly could not, affect the USA’s and the USSR’s nuclear arms race, although many Britons were sincerely moved by the idea of setting a good moral example to the world. It was about keeping out of the Cold War or, perhaps more exactly, about getting Britain used to no longer being a great power and a global empire. (The argument that Britain’s own nuclear capability was necessary to deter a Soviet attack made no sense, especially as we now know that the bomb had originally been constructed by British governments to maintain their status and independence against the USA rather than to frighten Moscow.)

However, looking back, it is clear that what increasingly shaped the post-1956 politics of the left was a by-product of decolonization and, certainly in Britain, of the mass immigration from the Caribbean parts of the old empire. The crisis of the Fourth Republic in France had little to do with the Cold War, and everything to do with the liberation struggle of the Algerians. I still recall a 1958 mass meeting in Friends’ House to protest against the military coup which ended it, addressed by the red-haired and impassioned journalist Paul Johnson, then a maverick left-wing Catholic, who denounced General de Gaulle as the next fascist dictator. It was largely the shocking and widely publicized French use of torture in Algeria that turned Amnesty International (1961), into a western international campaigning body not primarily directed against eastern abuses of human rights.

With the American civil rights movements and the influx of coloured immigrants to Britain, racism became a far more central theme on the left than it had been. Through jazz I found myself associated with an early anti-racist campaign in Britain after the so-called Notting Hill (actually Notting Dale) race riots of 1958, the so-called ‘Stars