The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age

It was half past eleven in the morning on 29 May 1953 when they unfurled four little flags on a string tied to Tenzing’s ice axe – the Union Flag, and alongside it the flags of Nepal, India and the United Nations, just seven years old. Only Hillary took photographs for a quarter of an hour – so there are none of him at the summit – and they started down.

Tenzing, the Nepalese Sherpa, had climbed the sacred mountain, which had defeated everyone else. He said that in the villages they asked him if he had seen the gods above the clouds. Lord Shiva, perhaps, for that was where he lived. No, said Tenzing, but he had felt a calm that inspired him, and did for the rest of his life.

They took their news down. Morris described seeing Hillary in the half light: ‘Huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakably assured, his energy almost demonic. He had a tremendous, bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some burly, bright diesel express bounding across America.’

And then the telegram. ‘Snow condition bad,’ he wrote, which meant ‘Everest climbed.’ In the rest of the message, which said the assault had been abandoned until the weather cleared, he used the code words agreed for Hillary and Tenzing. The rest of Fleet Street, squatting in Kathmandu, swallowed it. The Times had its scoop and on the morning of the Coronation it broke the news. The bells rang out for them.

An answering telegram reached the expedition that day, addressed to Sir Edmund Hillary, the new Queen’s first Knight.

He was a hero for the rest of his life. There were expeditions to both the poles, up the Ganges, back to the Himalayas, but above all for Hillary there was a commitment to the Nepalese people whom he’d come to know on the great climb. The Trust he established built two dozen schools; hospitals, bridges, airfields. He was celebrated as a humanitarian, and never lost the straightforwardness of the man who said he had always hated the ‘danger part’ of climbing and thought that the greatest of all feats was the comradeship that built up in the lonely places. ‘The giving of everything you’ve got,’ he said, ‘is really a very pleasant sensation.’

Edmund Hillary, adventurer, scientist and beekeeper, died in 2008, aged 88.

He once said that in honouring explorers from the past people should remember that it was ‘still not hard to find a man who adventures for the sake of a dream … or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching. Not for what he may find.’ That was the spirit Hillary tried to bring to his time.

Elizabeth David (#u8c93fdcf-8eee-535d-ac16-f601585f1fce)

When Elizabeth David began to write her first book for the British on the food of the Mediterranean, her readers were still disentangling themselves from wartime rationing. Olive oil was something you bought at the chemist, with a warning on the little bottle: ‘For external use only.’ She was going to raise their sights, even though she must have known that very few of the home cooks to whom she was addressing herself would have the inclination, let alone the appetite, to follow her instructions for stuffing a whole sheep. Yet that is what they might have done on the Greek island where, as a young woman, she had decamped at the end of the thirties with her married, older lover and where she consummated a life-long affair with food.

Not food as part of a dull household routine, but food as a creative force. More than that, food as the emblem of people’s lives: the thing that told you everything about them. When David published French Provincial Cooking in 1960 she told her readers of how she’d found a tattered book of recipes at the Sunday market in the cathedral square of Toulouse which exuded ‘a certain atmosphere of provincial life which appears orderly and calm whatever ferocious dramas may be seething below the surface’. And those hidden dramas were as interesting to her as the calm. Delving into the cuisine of the south of France, she gave her readers a sharp nudge: ‘It does not do to regard Provence simply as Keats’s tranquil land of song and mirth. The melancholy and the savagery are part of its spell.’

For those brought up with the homely straightforwardness of Mrs Beeton and successive generations of advisers on fruit cakes and steak and kidney pie, wholesome broth and sticky puddings, savage melancholy was probably new in the kitchen. But by the end of the fifties David had brought a new spirit to the table. She soon cast a spell on imitators and disciples enough to ensure that she become the first of the modern British cooks. Without her, it’s probably safe to say, there would have been no Delia Smith, no Jamie Oliver, none of the excitements of the cooking that became a celebrity industry and one of the most unexpected social changes of our time. She made it possible to speak of a culture of food without seeming pretentious or odd, though if she’d thought that spiky boys would one day be queuing up when they left school in the hope of becoming chefs, she would have been mightily surprised.

Her natural milieu was a privileged one. She came from money and whizzed around Europe with an abandon that only her class could afford. Yet by the time she’d got to know France and Italy and Greece, say by the time she was in her mid-thirties after the war, she had conceived a zeal that turned her into a kind of evangelist for something better for everyone; something that the English table as she’d known it had lost. She had lived with a family in Paris and Normandy whom she realized were ‘exceptionally greedy and exceptionally well-fed’ but learned the family cuisine of France at their table, as spectacular in its own way as haute cuisine of the Escoffier sort, and she’d also breathed in the smell of fresh lemons in the south, understood the sensuality of food, and realized – as she said – that there was nothing more alluring than the sight of a nearly ripe fig waiting to be pulled from its tree at dawn.

To readers reared on boiled beef and carrots (both overcooked, of course), she was a revelation. On Mediterranean food in 1950: ‘The ever recurring elements in the food throughout these countries are the oil, the saffron, the garlic, the pungent local wines; the aromatic perfume of rosemary, wild marjoram and basil drying in the kitchens; the brilliance of the market stalls piled high with pimentos, aubergines, tomatoes, olives, melons, figs and limes; the great heaps of shiny fish … the butchers’ stalls are festooned with every imaginable portion of the inside of every edible animal (anyone who has lived for long in Greece will be familiar with the sound of air gruesomely whistling through sheep’s lungs frying in oil).’

To many readers an aubergine was a strange, foreign thing – was it a fruit or a vegetable? … perhaps neither – and David was talking to a generation that knew little of pasta, let alone the spices and the food of the East. But there was actually nothing at all foreign about eggplant: it had just somehow been forgotten in Britain. Although she was an explorer who brought news of the exotic from distant places, her real passion – and maybe her legacy – was the cooking of home. For she wanted nothing so much as the rediscovery of what had been lost, and to remind anyone who wanted to cook well that there was a history and a heritage in the gardens and fields of her native land that deserved to have life brought back to it.

So when she published Summer Cooking in 1955 she started with regret about the ‘hypnotic power’ of the deep freeze and a plea for the rhythm of the seasons to be understood and respected. She had seen people in her local greengrocer’s crowding round the freezer to pay four shilling for a few strawberries in a cardboard box when they could have had seven perfectly ripe, sweet oranges for a quarter of that. And she wrote, with a knowing sigh: ‘As soon as strawberries and raspberries are in season they will be clamouring for frozen pineapple and cartons of orange juice.’ That could have been written half a century later, because the battle goes on, with the same forces still trying to abolish the natural calendar of the table.

Some of the recipes in that book are hymns to simplicity, a few sentences only. Yet David’s purée of sorrel, or mint chutney or polpette of mutton, or crab mousse, come out perfectly, and cooks have found them as pleasing to read as to eat. Chefs like Simon Hopkinson have talked about going to bed with the books to bring on the happiest of slumbers. She passes on classic recipes without alteration – one begins ‘skin, behead and wash some small eels’ – with careful attribution, and there is never any compromise. Just as when she refused to allow the shop she founded to sell garlic presses on the grounds not just that they were ridiculous but – worse than that – pathetic, she is emphatic at every turn. ‘As I understand it,’ she started her introduction to the book, ‘summer cooking means the extraction of maximum enjoyment out of the produce which grows in the summer season and is appropriate to it.’ She could have stopped right there, the point made.

You never had to wait long for an opinion. The journalist Katherine Whitehorn once asked her how she felt about those who might not have time to bake all their own bread, as she said they should. What, for example, about women who were at work all day? ‘That’s their problem,’ was the reply. David’s independent spirit was fiery. That first affair in the thirties, the flirtation with artistic Paris and some wild and bohemian corners of Europe, were the clue to someone who was going to go her own way, especially if she was told not to. Maybe it was always likely that she’d suffer in turn, and she did, much later being left by a long-time companion for another woman, and falling out with those who ran her shops and continued trading under her name after she’d severed all ties. Her last years – she died in 1992 – had their difficulties. Life was always a swirl of action and passion.

David was born in 1913 and her great escape began in her teens, after the unexpected death of her father, a Conservative MP. Her mother wanted to encourage her interest in painting and she was sent to the Sorbonne, then to Germany just before Hitler came to power, before coming back and going through the rituals that had always been expected of her: the debutante balls and a formal introduction into society. But she had already tasted something else, and was in Greece almost before anyone noticed. When she came home, the war was over, but food was still rationed. And maybe it was the austerity itself that egged her on. ‘With whatever I could find, I cooked like one possessed.’

The consequence was books that made a case for food as a pillar of civilization, without which everything might shrivel and die. At the start of French Provincial Cooking David said that any man or woman capable of cooking a good English roast was a good enough cook to produce something more imaginative. ‘If a dish does not turn out to be quite as it was at the remembered auberge in Normandy, or at the restaurant on the banks of the Loire, is this a matter for despair? Because it is different, as by force of circumstance it must be, it is not necessarily worse.’

And so she tried to lift everyone up. There were other cooks of her time who played big parts too: Marguerite Patten maybe prime among them, who’d emerged from the Ministry of Food in the war to try to crack the problem of the rationed kitchen and inspired many cooks. The first television equivalent was Fanny Cradock, with her ubiquitous and put-upon husband Johnnie, who rushed from oven to table and back again, turning the kitchen into a place of well-meaning frenzy. But the real legacy of Elizabeth David came later, when Delia Smith decided that it was time to write a book for another lost generation, went on television, and sold millions of copies of her Complete Cookery Course.

There was none of David’s tales of savage Provence, or whole-sheep-stuffing from the Greek islands, and Delia was a classless cook to Elizabeth’s grande dame. But they were at the same game: reminding people, encouraged to turn bland by fashion and advertising and the marketing of the unimaginative, that there was pleasure to be had in the kitchen. When David was made OBE at Buckingham Palace in 1976, she reported afterwards that when she said she wrote cookery books, the monarch replied simply, ‘How useful.’ Nothing about savage melancholy, nor the passion of a fig, nor the joys of a long day at the pot. But, through it all, Elizabeth David did want to be useful too.

Graham Greene (#u8c93fdcf-8eee-535d-ac16-f601585f1fce)

Graham Greene’s game was danger. As a novelist he played with characters who were always throwing the dice and gambling with their moral fate. He was a spy, he said he’d played Russian roulette with a loaded gun (though hardly anyone knew whether to believe him), he was fascinated by treachery and claimed kinship with the betrayers, he toyed with women and religion.

But, through it all, the spine of his life was a high seriousness about writing. When he started to call some of his books ‘entertainments’ he was having fun with people again, for stories like Our Man in Havana didn’t abandon that interest in loyalty and deceit, guilt and shame. This was his territory, a place he made his own, where anxious people dealt with a world beyond their understanding, grappling for handholds and never finding it easy. W.H. Auden spoke of things being Graham Greenish and everyone knew what colour that was. Dark, menacing, strangely inviting. From the thirties on, his output had been growing – novels, film criticism, essays, film scripts – and his lugubrious, rangy, world-weary figure, wreathed in smoke, seemed to beckon his readers to a place that might be dangerous and treacherous, but was somehow familiar.

By the time he published The End of the Affair in 1951 Greene was established at the top of the tree. Three characters, above all, had put him there: Pinkie the teenage gangster in Brighton Rock, the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory and Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, who were all in some way caught between their instincts and their obligations, and tortured as a result. He could produce moral terror in the blink of an eye, and by the fifties it seemed that he was the contemporary novelist who had the most sensitive, fingertip feel for the confusions and the alarms of the time.

‘Greene-land’ – a label that irritated him – was a place where people were alone, bewildered by the dilemmas forced on them by the world and haunted by their inability to reconcile that pain with their sense of something beyond: the divine, or at least the unchanging. Greene always preferred to be called a novelist who was a Catholic rather than a Catholic novelist, but his conversion in the twenties was the event that shaped him as a writer. He called himself an intellectual but not an emotional Catholic, and you don’t have to read much of his fiction to start to understand the tension.

By the end of his life he was calling himself a ‘Catholic atheist’, and left even his friends to wonder where his journey had taken him. They did know that by the fifties he had staked out territory that he controlled, in which the lies and betrayals of daily life – about love, or country, or personal pride – were played out on a wider, dark stage, where you could never be sure what was waiting in the wings.

Naturally this irritated some people. When George Orwell reviewed The End of the Affair (based on one of Greene’s own liaisons) he expressed the frustration of someone who found the possible intervention of divine judgment a distraction from the much more important business of human decency. He wrote in the New Yorker: ‘He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.’

It definitely had a dark allure for Greene, whose characters so often flirted with whatever went on in that nightclub or were drawn to it by some urge that they couldn’t understand. The main character in his first book, The Man Within, is a hunted man, and right through to his later fiction – think of the spy novel The Human Factor, published in the late seventies – he was preoccupied with the figure pursued across the landscape by demons, some of them invisible and some of them deep inside and all too familiar.

There was another reason for his popularity, of course. He knew how to tell a story, how to play with tension – above all, how to hook a reader. The first sentence of Brighton Rock ensures that you’re bound to read on: ‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton for three hours, that they meant to murder him.’ His screenplay for Orson Welles in The Third Man showed that he understood exactly how film too could tell a story: every piece falls into place, the rhythm never falters. It’s classic Greene: a man seeks justice for a friend, killed in the dark streets of post-war Vienna, only to discover that he has faked his death to escape from the consequences of his own crimes.

For Greene the fifties began with The End of the Affair and ended with Our Man in Havana and A Burnt-out Case. All three were about weakness and deceit. And in between came one of his greatest novels, The Quiet American. He’d worked in Indo-China as a journalist, and the story of Pyle, the American of the title, foreshadowed all the arguments that would traumatize America over Vietnam a decade later. Pyle is idealistic and at the same time ruthless in his belief about what can and should be done to the Communists, and Greene wove a moral tale which got him targeted by the Washington authorities as anti-American, in an age when in their eyes the distinction between good and evil was rather clearer than it could ever be in a Greene story.

And readers knew that there was something going on at home too. The novel was published in 1955, the year before the débâcle of the Suez invasion. That decision by Anthony Eden’s government to deceive Washington and collude with France and Israel in attacking Egypt was the foreign policy catastrophe of the age, dividing the country, shaking the political class. It was this event, more than any other, that a few years later led a former American secretary of state to coin a famous aphorism which hurt with its stinging truth. ‘Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role,’ said Dean Acheson.

Greene, in The Quiet American, told a story that caught the wind that was blowing in south-east Asia and would bring trouble along. It also picked up, at home, the nervousness of an age in which the deep freeze of the Cold War did not stop people from realizing that everything was on the move. The post-war world was being reordered, and no one yet understood the consequences. Greene was a storyteller who was also a poet of the moment, picking up whispers from the street and tremblings of the political web.

He’d also done it as a professional spy. We know only the sketchiest outline of what he did for the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. But he was there and enjoyed saying that he had an identification number in the service which he subsequently attached to the controller of the hapless agent Wormold in Our Man in Havana. Wormold finds himself recruited by British intelligence and tempted to enhance his persona as a spy, first by some fairly harmless exaggeration and then by spectacular invention. But he survives. After a fashion.

Greene worked in MI6, formally, for three years or so during the Second World War and was alongside Kim Philby, Moscow’s master spy. It was not until the late sixties that the story of Philby’s career and eventual defection was told to the public, after Sunday Times journalists penetrated the layers of desperate obfuscation that had kept it hidden.

But much earlier, following the electrifying defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean from the Foreign Office to Moscow in 1952, Greene will have known the story from his friends: that enough people in Whitehall were convinced of Philby’s treachery to heave him out and let him moulder away in Beirut, half journalist and half old spook, until he went to Moscow. Greene’s own connections at that time, when he was a celebrated writer, have always been mysterious, not least because he liked it that way.

It does seem clear that, certainly in the fifties and perhaps for much longer, he was in touch with old friends from his service, bringing back titbits from his travels, casting a wary eye on anything that stirred his interest. In Indo-China in the fifties he certainly acted as a trusted observer and informant. His biographer Norman Sherry said that he was, in the end, ‘the perfect spy … an intensely secretive man’. This is the truth of it. Evelyn Waugh, fellow novelist, fellow Catholic convert, lent support when Greene would get into trouble for some outburst, as he did in 1960 when he was criticized for defending the Soviet Union. Waugh said in a letter to a friend that Greene was ‘a secret agent on our side and all his buttering up of the Russians is cover …’. Who knows? That’s the thing about secretive men.

Greene’s output was immense – the novels, reviews, essays, plays – and his era spanned the thirties to the eighties. In that time he became a lodestar for many writers as the master craftsman. William Golding said that he was great because he was ‘the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety’.

By the fifties that judgement had become indelible. Although Greene continued to write for more than three decades after The Quiet American (and thought that The Honorary Consul, from the seventies, was his best book), his early work had established his voice as unmistakable, demanding and perpetually unsettling. There was always a question lying underneath, gnawing away.

That feeling never left him. His last words, in hospital in Switzerland in April 1991, when he knew he was dying, were, ‘Why must it take so long to come?’

Michael Young (#u8c93fdcf-8eee-535d-ac16-f601585f1fce)

Sociologists seldom get a good press, except where they don’t need it.

Michael Young was a great exception. He was an innovating intellectual whose brain was happy to put theory and practicality in the same compartment, and many thousands of people who had never heard of his fifties book The Rise of the Meritocracy will know of the Consumers’ Association and the Open University, and perhaps be thankful for them, but not attach his name to either body. Yet without him they might not have existed. He was a public figure who liked not to be very public; a force for change who achieved much more than most of the ministers and mandarins to whom he often had to sell an idea and whose most precious possession has always been to say yea and nay.

Lord Young of Dartington, as he became in 1978, was a thinker who never tucked himself away. When Cambridge University asked him to set up its sociology course, having come late to the notion, he thought the dons too rigid in their thinking and backed out quickly. He preferred to be free of confining institutions, a feeling that probably gripped him for life when as a teenager he came under the influence of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. The couple had set up Dartington Hall in Devon as a radical school, intended unashamedly for a select band of children of free thinkers in the intelligentsia who would be given their heads and encouraged to contemplate utopia. It was an inspiration. Thanks to Dorothy Elmhirst, Young found himself having dinner with Franklin Roosevelt in the White House and being encouraged to argue. It was his fifth school, his parents having broken up, and it became his own utopia. The urge to think differently never left him.

Politically, Young was one of the most important people in post-war Britain, though from a back room. Excused military service because of chronic asthma, he worked in an early think-tank – it had the austere name Political and Economic Planning – which gave him his first experience of bringing together people of ideas and policymakers. This experience produced a document that, by any standards, was of huge importance. At the age of 29 he wrote – more or less single-handedly – the Labour Party manifesto for the 1945 general election. After Clement Atlee’s victory it became the template for a government that had a chance to be radical in the post-war era, transforming the economic model of the country, establishing the National Health Service, and outlining a social consensus that held sway across the parties for the next generation.

However, Young didn’t take to front-line politics at that stage, for by the start of the fifties he had already decided that the Labour Party he helped to bring to power had run out of ideas. He left his job, went to the London School of Economics, and made a decision that would shape the rest of his life. He moved to Bethnal Green in the East End of London, an area battered by the blitz and racked with poverty, a world that despite his interest in public policy he had never seen. Politicians, he thought, had lost touch with these people: ‘The local councillors heard the complaints,’ he said, ‘but did nothing about them because they’d been captured by officials.’

Characteristically, his first reaction was to think. He set up what he called the Institute of Community Studies. Working with Peter Willmott, he began to study the East End and write about the people, trying to get a feel for the barriers that were preventing them from having better lives, and pondering the social changes that might be needed. One of his first books, Family and Kinship in East London, published in 1957, made a shattering noise. It argued against the planners’ lust for sweeping urban redevelopment and tried to bring the values of family and shared experience to bear on social policy. Over the next few years his ideas excited, irritated and disturbed policymakers and he became a voice of social reform in the manner of some of the Victorians he greatly admired, like the philanthropic reformers Joseph Rowntree and Charles Booth. This didn’t sit well with some fellow academics in his field, who found his faith in that kind of individual action a little quaint, but he couldn’t have cared less. There was a streak of romanticism in him. He was the kind of man who never said ‘why?’, but usually ‘why not?’

Throughout the fifties he challenged conventional thinking which he thought had let people down, and pursued his own form of egalitarianism. Even many of those who wouldn’t go all the way with him – on comprehensive education, for example – found his ideas inspiring. The Rise of the Meritocracy, written with Willmott, brought a new word into the language, sold half a million copies and was, he hoped, a warning against what might happen to a society that was too careful in favouring the strong over the weak.

But in the year before his death, 2001, Young confessed that he had been sadly disappointed by the book – not because of any of its ideas, but because people had long forgotten that it was a satire, a caution. Instead, he was forced to lament the fact that the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was now using the word ‘meritocracy’ with approval, as a benign object of policy. ‘I do wish he wouldn’t,’ he said. He recalled that the book – which he assumed Tony Blair had never read – was a warning about what might have happened seventy-five years on if society insisted on dividing people into sheep and goats. He wrote, ‘My imaginary author, an ardent apostle of meritocracy, said shortly before the revolution, that “No longer is it so necessary to debase standards by attempting to extend a higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes.”’