It is a tremendous shame when a wonderful book goes out of print. Noel Annan’s, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation was first published in 1990. It is a masterly rendition of his generation, or the 1945-1990 period. Annan’s book is an invaluable guide in understanding contemporary British politics and culture of the last fifteen years because he reproduces the past so gracefully. What influenced the development of New Labour and Tony Blair? How influential was Thatcherism? How did Britain change from an Empire to being the sidekick of the United States? Although some of these topics are not directly covered in the book, in retrospect we can see British history of the past fifteen years much more clearly with Annan’s supreme commentary because he was such a shrewd observer. It is also unfortunate he is not around anymore since his analysis of the flux happening in British politics now would be fascinating to read.
Our adventure does not start in 1945. Annan paints the two crucial influences, which flowed into his time like torrents: Modernism and Pacifism. According to Annan, the gentlemanly attitude meant to be exhibited by the quintessential English snobs was a bit “oth-eaten” by the First World War. The straight jacket ideals and hypocritical life led in the Victorian Age that waddled sweating heavily into the Edwardian Age (1901-1914) were blown away by that conflict.
Out of the crucible emerged two opposing ideologies that shaped the perception of mankind in Britain from 1918-1945. The highly avant-garde movement of Modernism was concerned with the degradation of man, rootless culture and civilisations being destroyed. T. S. Eliot beautifully articulated these themes in The Waste Land. We were rats that “crept softly through the vegetation.” Pacifism was the other end, a silly notion that wars were never morally justifiable. It was also hopelessly idealistic.
Bertrand Russell, the most well known philosopher of his era embodied this as he was against both world wars (the second he did come round to supporting, eventually) and campaigned for Nuclear Disarmament in face of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Russell was a hero to the Left in the Thirties, which eventually came to realise Hitler had to be stopped yet failed to acknowledge rearmament was needed to do this, so they opposed it. Russell wrote “prose whose lucidity was equalled by its elegance.” Unfortunately, his sharp mind and literary gifts were coloured by having, “little sense of history.”
Russell made the same fatal mistake as Neville Chamberlain and his fellow Appeasers. They assumed that “human nature was changeless and all men were animated by the same ideas.” It seems having a “sense of history” did not help in unmasking what Hitler really was. Anthony Eden, the ‘glamour boy’ of Chamberlain’s government and a famous Anti-Appeaser was largely responsible for the humiliating Suez Crisis in 1956. He based his interpretation on the Munich Agreement but as Annan correctly concludes, “It became a symbol of political misjudgement,” which severed relationships and caused exceptionally embittered arguments.
Noel Annan’s Age produced a variety of literary figures and politicians that were inferior to the previous generation. Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf and Shaw were (as individuals and a combined force) superior to Larkin, Hughes, Waugh, Amis and Pinter. The two outstanding political heavyweights of the first half of the twentieth century: Lloyd George and Winston Churchill; heavily outweighed Prime Ministers such as Clement Atlee, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath in their luminous but flawed brilliance. The only Prime Minister that bore comparison to them in her lasting influence, great egoism and combative style was Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was a woman who delighted in stepping on ministers. Ironically, her greatest contribution was she broke the trade unions so thoroughly that the Labour Party, (that had been out of government for eighteen years) finally recaptured Downing Street in 1997 after being released from their shackles.
Annan demonstrates the quagmire that Britain entered in the 1970s and the disintegration of the British Left, which accompanied it. In 1955 Britain, “had been the strongest military and economic power in Europe and the leader in atomic energy.” By 1979, nothing could be further from the truth. What could explain Britain’s decline in the world? The country for one was not an imperial power anymore yet this does not fully clarify what went wrong. A partial explanation lies in the superiority complex some members of the British establishment still had. The Suez Crisis, although partly derived from the ‘lessons of Munich’ was not the sole factor in Britain’s misjudged intervention, pride was there also. Suez became a metaphor for Britain’s increasing reliance on American power.
Three other complex factors explained Britain’s difficult decade: Militant trade unionism and grotesque mismanagement moulded an almost dead economy that was very inefficient compared to its French and German counterparts.
Equally, the pompous refusal of Britain to join the European community in the 1950s did much damage later on. Annan remembers that by “the mid-fifties Europe was once again stable and the refusal of the Conservative Government to take seriously the Messina Conference that would lead to the Treaty of Rome was inexcusable. It was the most ruinous decision taken by Our Age.”
The Belgium Foreign Minister, Paul-Hanri Spaak remarked on the remarkable distance of Rab Butler in not being convinced on the merits of joining Europe, “I don’t think I could have shocked him more when I tried to appeal to his imagination if I had taken my trousers off.”
Similarly, De Gaulle and Adenauer never forgave the cold shrug of indifference Britain gave their countries. De Gaulle delighted in refusing the entry of Britain twice.
Annan’s straight questions portray the size of the bureaucratic beast Britain had become economically in the 1970s. “How could industry compete when compelled to negotiate with a 150 trade unions when Germany only had 17?” Similarly, “Our management was inefficient and there was no interchange in Britain between the top of the civil service, banking and industry as there was in France.”
The successive governments in the 1970s, whether it was Heath’s Conservatives or Wilson’s and Callaghan’s Labour administrations were seemingly powerless to reverse Britain’s decline. Michael Foot and Tony Benn were the left – wing high flyers who represented some of the more extreme and questionable figures on the Left. Foot, according to Annan, “at the department of employment resembled a baron in the War of the Roses: one could never be certain which side he was on.”
Equally, Benn was a man of “prodigious gifts” who could speak “lucidly” and was “selfless.” Trashing his talents was his ability “to make any unreasonable argument seem reasonable.” Benn’s skill at doing this epitomised the dangerous mentality that grasped certain parts of Left in the 1970s, a factor, which fused with the bigoted “trade unions destroyed social democracy for a decade” and allowed the other extremism of Thatcherism to come to power.
Annan, although a Conservative to the heart, touchingly writes about the one left-wing Labour politician whom he most admired and deservedly so, the great Roy Jenkins. Jenkins held office as Deputy Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary. He was the “most balanced” and “skilful” of the Labour frontbenchers from 1964 onwards. He broke off to form the Social Democratic Party in 1980 to seize the middle ground between the far left and far right.
Annan remembers poignantly, “He returned home from Europe hopeful of forming a social democratic party; and many of our age after the winter of the discontent followed him. I was not one of them. I could not believe that a fourth party could ever detach sufficient numbers of Labour votes in perpetuity.”
Annan’s book is a slept on classic and there are many other subjects and quotations that could be mentioned. Unfortunately, there is not enough space in a review to do it justice.
He movingly finishes his synthesis with the knowledge that his generation was dying as all generations do. He quotes Thomas Hardy saying, “we are going gentlemen.” It may, however, be more apt to quote Shakespeare in The Tempest where he declared:
“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Noel Annan’s writing showed that he was a human of exceptional intelligence, wonderful wit and a delicate sensitivity.
Brief bio:
Annan was born in 1916, he studied at Cambridge where he read history then stayed on to read law. He served in the German section of military intelligence and then the joint Intelligence Staff of the War Cabinet Office. After the war he supervised the development of political parties in the British Zone in Germany and then returned to take up his Fellowship at Cambridge. He was elected Provost of Kings at the age of thirty nine. He then moved to become head of University College London and was elected the first full-time Vice Chancellor of the University of London. He was Chairman of Trustees of the National Gallery, a trustee of the British Museum for seventeen years and a Director for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, for eleven years. He wrote the Annan report on the future of broadcasting in 1977. He died in 2000.
Book details:
The book was first published in 1990 by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited (London). The price on my copy is �20.00. I am not sure precisely when it went out of print.
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