IT’S BEEN AN AGE

As a quaint, archaic phrase inextricably bound-up with the monochrome optimism of the immediate post-war 1950s, ‘The New Elizabethan Age’ hadn’t stood the test of time until its recent revival (for obvious reasons). However, with the passing of the Queen whose name this imaginary era had rented, do we now acknowledge it was an authentic epoch in itself or do we accept whatever achievements history might like to squeeze under such a convenient umbrella label simply took place on Her Majesty’s watch even when she wasn’t watching? Will the future file this age away so that the past 70 years will retrospectively group together everything from The Beatles to Brexit, Bond to Bowie, Coronation Street to Concorde, Thunderbirds to Thatcherism, Paddington to Punk Rock, and from Tommy Steele to Tim Berners-Lee? Well, it’s probably in the hands of the generations who never lived through it, though many of us who lived through at least half of it recognise whatever creative and cultural renaissance this country coincidentally experienced whilst Brenda occupied the throne drew to a close long before she breathed her last at Balmoral.

As if to confirm this, a video that did the rounds on Twitter this week featured the contemporary ‘star’ Rita Ora labouring under the misapprehension that she’s Aretha Franklin reincarnated as a lap-dancer. The focus of said video was Ora’s attempt to turn Kate Bush’s ‘Running up that Hill’, into a sub-Beyoncé vehicle for the extended – not to say excruciating – practicing of scales. On the video, Ora evidently believes what she’s doing marks her out as an artist of some repute; the sycophantic encouragement of an audience perpetuating her fantasy is as sad as Ora’s embarrassing conviction of her own greatness, though both are victims of low expectations and an inability to question the hype. The Auto-Tuned digital trickery that fools some into believing deluded marionettes with all the soul of The Archies are worthy of bracketing along with the genuine articles who shone so brightly and so far-reaching in the first half of the New Elizabethan Age is never more exposed than in the live arena; but so desensitised are the Spotified public to the charade that convinces them they’re witness to landmark talents rather than average mediocrities, it already feels like it’s too late to extinguish the artistic inferno our Rome has long been engulfed in.

The last monarch to occupy the throne for over half-a-century, Queen Victoria, of course gave her name to her age and was witness to her own revolution as a society transformed by industry – everything from the railways to the telegraph to the telephone and the internal combustion engine – also saw imperial and civic expansion as well as the codification and professionalism of sports that are still with us; and as literacy grew, it was fitting that the written word became the prominent artistic medium. The great novelists of the 19th century stamped their art on their era as much as musicians were to do in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. But just as few of the novelists who came after Victoria were able to make quite the same immense cultural impact enjoyed by the giants of her era, the musical survivors of the 1960s and 70s remain the biggest draws on a touring circuit which would struggle to break even without the profitable presence of ‘Heritage Rock’. Perhaps future generations will discern the decline of the dominant creative form of the New Elizabethan Age and tie its end in with the death of Elizabeth herself, despite the fact it was wielding a walking stick well in advance of Her Majesty.

Those who find themselves prominent movers and shakers during an age – or at the very least find themselves reporting from the frontline of it – tend not to name their eras; as a term, the New Elizabethan Age seems to have been bandied about a lot up to and around the 1953 Coronation by that day’s media, almost imposed on the populace in the hope it would catch on. But it doesn’t recur much thereafter. When England swung a decade later, you’d be hard pushed to find Carnaby Street referenced as emblematic of the New Elizabethan Age; and I’ve no doubt the groovy guys and gals haunting that particular thoroughfare would have laughed if anyone had tried to pin such an antiquated label on their party. It probably sounded terribly ‘square’ by 1966 – just another dated and discarded piece of slang when the verbal lexicon was moving at a pace those beyond the bubble could never hope to keep up with. But if one were to return to the beginning of the Queen’s reign, perhaps the undeniable boost to weary austerity Britain of having a young woman on the throne instead of an old man tapped into something that was already slowly taking shape, something that would lead all the way from the South Bank to Soho.

Looking back, it’s clear that the confident Modernist architecture which received a nationwide window at the 1951 Festival of Britain anticipated the first flowering of something new. The sky-scraping, Dan Dare-like futurism of the Skylon and the equally Space-Age flourishes of the Royal Festival Hall pointed the way towards related edifices of the early 60s such as the BBC Television Centre and Coventry Cathedral. The consecration of the latter in 1962 was accompanied by the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem’, an aptly moving piece aired in the shadow of the bombed-out ruin it replaced. Britten himself was perhaps the key artistic figure of that early Elizabethan Age, being an incredibly prolific and lionised composer nonetheless saddled with the antisocial urges of his sexuality at a time when the Law had yet to embrace the spirit of change. Like Philip Larkin, whose melancholy musings on the type of sexual intercourse that characterised the country after 1963 were laced with regret at missing out, Britten belonged to a generation still coping with the seismic interruption of global conflict to their lives, an experience that would always distance them from the kids searching for shrapnel on bombsites. Those kids were the ones in whose hands the glorious bloom of the New Elizabethan Age rested, and whose efforts would be most richly rewarded.

Britten’s sublime ‘Four Sea Interludes’ – which were originally composed as instrumental passages for his celebrated opera, ‘Peter Grimes’ – were already on my looped playlist before events at Victoria and Albert’s Highland hideaway pushed the New Elizabethan Age back onto the agenda. But as a suddenly poignant soundtrack, they seem to speak to something recent developments have reignited; they are the sound of an ancient island nation instinctively looking out to sea, evoking everything from the place names on the Shipping Forecast to the dying director Derek Jarman pottering about his garden as the toxic silhouette of Dungeness Nuclear Power Station loiters on the windswept horizon. It goes without saying that the history of these islands predates the awareness of those who dictate the popular narrative, so that any ‘age’ doesn’t take place in isolation; it usually has roots stretching back decades, even centuries. Maybe the passing of Her Majesty and the age to which she gave her name has simply brought everything we’ve taken for granted back into focus and provoked a little soul-searching. But we have been here before – just not for a long time.

Whether Vaughan Williams borrowing from Thomas Tallis, Fairport Convention electrifying traditional English Folk songs, or any updated production of Shakespeare you care to mention, little in British popular culture springs from the soil without having been planted there by our forefathers. And if the crown of the kingdom happens to remain on the same head for long enough, chances are history will round up every disparate collection of creative vagabonds and name the years through which they operated after the sovereign observing (and occasionally rewarding) their efforts. In this respect, the New Elizabethan Age was for real – a unique renaissance we’ve all been beneficiaries of.

© The Editor

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RETURN TO BRENDA

A royal record is poised to be broken, though unlike the publicity afforded Queen Elizabeth II’s overtaking of Queen Victoria last September, this one ‘officially’ doesn’t count and probably won’t get much in the way of coverage. Brenda may turn 90 today, solidifying her position as the oldest sovereign Britain has ever had; but if she makes it to May 11, she will have surpassed the titular reign of James III, the reign that never was. History knows him as The Old Pretender, but the King across the Water was never crowned, his birth as a Catholic heir leading to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. To those loyal to the Jacobite cause, James Francis Edward Stuart was always recognised as the legitimate King of England, Scotland and Ireland, and as such reigned in a parallel universe for 64 years.

James succeeded his dethroned father James II aged just 13. By contrast, Brenda was 25 when she ascended to the throne in 1952, seven years older than Victoria had been when she became queen in 1837. But her maternal genes are made of strong stuff; the Queen Mother was over 100 when she died, lest we forget, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that there could even be an unprecedented Platinum Jubilee on the horizon. I don’t suppose anyone anticipated this when Princess Elizabeth was informed of her father’s death whilst on a royal tour of Kenya. George VI had reigned for just sixteen years. In fact, anyone over, say, fifty-three the day we entered what was trumpeted as the New Elizabethan Age would have already seen five different monarchs occupying the throne; by contrast, to have been born just before the reign of Elizabeth II began, one would now be within a year or two of retirement age.

The longer the reign, the more potential for change in the wider society, and it could be argued the changes that have taken place since 1952 are on a par with those that took place during the Victorian Age. When Victoria became queen upon the death of her uncle William IV, she was the only legitimate living child sired by any of her grandfather George III’s notoriously rakish sons. She was born into a transitional era that had seen both the end of Napoleonic domination of Europe and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, with the pendulum of power swinging away from France towards Britain. The woman who ended up being associated with a strain of prudish Puritanism was actually a product of the Regency and was in possession of all the hedonistic frivolity that went with it during her spell as Europe’s most envied marital prize. It was strait-laced husband Albert (the son of a philandering rake himself) and his determination not to repeat his father’s mistakes that redesigned the image of a battered brand and turned the royal household from a hotbed of disreputable debauchery to the nation’s moral barometer.

With Victoria as the figurehead, Britain spread its imperial wings and was ruling over almost a quarter of the world’s population by the time of her death aged 81. Its navy acted as the maritime world police and its language, culture and industry circumnavigated the globe. After Bonaparte, Victoria became one of the first internationally recognisable public figures, with her iconic properties as the reincarnation of Britannia the nineteenth century’s equivalent of the Che Guevara poster that used to be an obligatory addition to the bedroom walls of every campus dormitory. When she celebrated her 1897 Diamond Jubilee, the event was marked everywhere from Calcutta to Cape Town, from Sydney to Singapore, and from Montreal to Malta.

During Victoria’s reign, transport went from horsepower to steam power and then the internal combustion engine. Advances in industry built railways and laid cables under the ocean to open up a new lines of communication, whilst advances in science and medicine saved lives and (in the case of Darwin) rewrote the history of mankind; social reformers attempted to do something about the kind of poverty we’d now associate with the Third World; the working-class was given a voice with the formation of trade unions and extension of the voting franchise; demands for women’s rights became organised; and the flourishing of the Arts in particular helped establish Britain as the cultural capital of the world. Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, Eliot, Gaskell, Trollope, Hardy, Lear, Carroll and Wilde all produced their literary masterpieces on Victoria’s watch; the Pre-Raphaelites rocked the galleries and Elgar embarked upon his distinguished musical journey, whilst photography and then moving pictures brought us one step closer to the twentieth century. The formation of police forces and improvements in street lighting via gas and, eventually, electricity made the streets safer, the Gothic Revival gave dramatic new architectural skylines to the towns and cities in which those streets were situated, and rising literacy levels, not to mention civic museums, libraries and swimming baths as well as the codification and new professionalism of sports such as cricket, tennis, golf, association football and both strains of rugby aided in the intellectual and physical improvement of Victoria’s subjects. When she finally passed away in January 1901, the country that mourned her was very different to what it had been in 1819.

And what of the country inherited by Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter half-a-century later? The slow recovery from the ravages of war was still a work-in-progress with many of the new queen’s subjects living in housing that had been condemned as unfit for human habitation decades before, the class system had been temporarily fractured by conflict and was attempting to revert to its pre-war distinctions, television had yet to supplant radio or the cinema as the medium of the masses, corporal and capital punishment were still enforced, National Service continued to interrupt male civilian lives, homosexuality and abortion remained illegal acts punishable with prison sentences, illegitimate birth was a social stigma, mass immigration from the colonies hadn’t yet altered what was a predominantly white society, and the nation’s Prime Minister, Churchill, was approaching eighty. Sixty-four years later, the same monarch presides over a different country in a different century.

The year of Elizabeth II’s Coronation saw Crick and Watson discover the structure of DNA, an early sign that the new queen was about to begin her reign on the cusp of changes that would radically transform the monochrome kingdom in ways comparable to those that Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother had overseen. These changes are perhaps more evident and within living memory, so don’t necessary need to be recited like the ones that occurred during Victoria’s reign; but even those of us whose lifetimes haven’t yet spanned fifty years have witnessed dramatic alterations to everyday life that in many cases would have been pure sci-fi in 1952. The technology that enables me to write this piece as well as enabling you to read it, wherever on the planet you happen to be, is just one.

Whatever one’s opinion of her or the institution of monarchy in general, Elizabeth II’s place in the history books is already ensured, with the next landmark on the list being just three weeks away. It would therefore be somewhat churlish not to wish her a happy birthday on yet another day in which we’ve all seen her face again – even if that was only due to pulling change from our wallets and purses.

© The Editor

WE ARE NOT AMUSED

Have you heard the one about the anti-fascist protest where protestors were there to prevent libertarians from exercising their right to free speech, hid their identities behind masks, poured a bottle of piss over someone who had the guts to stand up to them, and generally behaved with all the restraint of fanatical Jihadists setting fire to the stars & stripes? Unfortunately, there isn’t a funny punch-line. This happened in Canada – yes, the laidback, easygoing next-door neighbour of the USA; but it could just as easily have happened here in Blighty. The recipient of the unwanted golden shower didn’t go running and crying to a ‘safe space’ to suck her thumb and dial 911 (or whatever number Canadians dial for law enforcement), followed by a crash-course in therapy to reiterate that she remains ‘special’; she walked away with as much dignity as she could muster because she wasn’t the fascist present; the spoilt brat who doused her in wee-wee was. And those who couldn’t make it to the latest Nuremberg Rally aired their opinions of the punishment dished out to the she-devil with a series of sympathetic commiserations on twitter.

It’s no wonder the regressive left is an apologist for Islamic Fundamentalism and every other crazed faction that is hailed as a heroic bulwark against the white, straight, women-suppressing, ethnic minority-suppressing, gay-suppressing, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic and racist world elite that controls the planet. They share the same narrow worldview, only differing in the route that brought them to it. That their Vancouver branch expressed the intolerance of their secular Puritanism by aiming their ire and bodily waste at Canadian broadcaster and vocal critic of their manifesto Lauren Southern is not merely the action of overgrown children to whom ‘no’ was never said; it also lays bare their belief that a man who still has his tackle intact but chooses to play the part of the opposite sex is more of a woman than the real thing, should she happen to disagree with them.

The British branch of the international prohibitionists have mainly focused their attention on inanimate human facsimiles rather than living, flesh-and-blood people who can provide a counter argument, with the honourable exception of those renowned fascists, Tatchell and Greer; the targets of their illogical and ill-educated fury are old statues of prominent figures usually emanating from a past that Blairite educational reforms deliberately provided them with no history of, other than labelling everyone who wasn’t a slave or repressed colonial as a rabid racist. The empire-builders and military leaders are easy targets, as they tend to be the ones who had statues sculpted in their honour; but to dismiss Britain’s imperial past in one ignorant swoop is also a slur on the thousands of Brits who spent their entire working lives out in the colonies, ones whose unvisited resting places crumbling in overgrown graveyards on the Indian Subcontinent (amongst other locations) are testament to their forgotten contribution in establishing the best of British principles – not to mention the English language – on foreign soil. Anyway, unlike most of our European colonial competitors, Britain rarely invaded another country; the majority of Britain’s overseas possessions grew organically over decades from their humble beginnings as trading posts, the classic mark of a maritime nation.

Queen Victoria herself is the latest focus of the Ministry of Truth’s brown-shirt brigade, though it will be difficult to remove all of her stone likenesses from the landscape, considering every city in the country erected a statue to her when she died. Even during her long lifetime, Victoria was immortalised as the embodiment of Britannia, a symbolic mother figure to the Empire, thus singling her out as another representative of our shameful history. How many of these foaming-at-the-mouth revisionists know anything about the woman – one possessing natural breasts and vagina – who reigned for over sixty years and gave her name to an entire era, the only time a woman has ever done so other than Elizabeth I?

Are they, for example, aware that in her later years, Victoria became enamoured with Indian culture and had a Muslim secretary called Abdul Karim, who was her close confidant for the last decade of her life, much to the disapproval of her less enlightened staff and family? She was ahead of her time in the case of Karim, whereas her disapproval of women’s suffrage was more typical of her time. Contrary to her popular image, Victoria was a passionate woman who revelled in the sexual relationship she enjoyed with her husband Prince Albert, something that the brood she brought into the world underlines, despite the fact that continuous pregnancy got in the way of these erotic interludes. In this, she was very much in tune with her female subjects at a time of primitive and ineffective contraception.

For at least the second half of her reign, Queen Victoria was the most famous woman on the planet, and despite the lack of electoral representation for women in the mother country, great strides were taken by many women during that reign, strides that ended the absolute power of husbands in marriage, strides that challenged the exploitation of low-paid women workers, strides that curtailed the legal abuse of prostitutes, strides that broke down the barriers of higher education, and strides that contradict the retrospective image of Victorian women as shrinking violets forever fainting and swooning.

On International Women’s Day, how ironic that these great strides taken over a century ago have been conveniently buried in a past that we are now supposed to be ashamed of, leaving us with a generation of women reverting to playing the victim, either of unequal opportunities in the workplace or the wicked libido of the male sex. Carping on about how hard done-by they are seems to be the default button of some women to elicit sympathy and to be in denial of just how much has changed, particularly in the western world, over the past 100 years. One would almost think being the underdog is some form of feminine comfort zone. But then, there’s more to women today than a pair of breasts and a vagina – like a penis.

© The Editor