Challenging Myths of the 1960s: The Case of Student Protest in Britain
While much current scholarship and research on the 1960s takes the existence of a number of myths about the 1960s for granted, effective attempts to define and challenge such myths are rare. One aspect of the period that has suffered conspicuously from this neglect, and indeed from a lack of detailed research, is the series of protests by students that occurred in Britain in the second half of the decade. The myths that have been constructed around these protests are numerous, and many are, at first glance at least, persuasive. When they are analysed, however, they are found to be misleading, and have resulted in the creation of a distorted view of this aspect of the period. In the late 1960s, while the streets of Paris and numerous other cities in America and Europe were occupied by rioting students and were littered with burning cars, students were also protesting in Britain. At the time these protests provoked extreme reactions, ranging from fear to hope, and from anticipation to contempt. In subsequent decades they have been * Much of the research informing this article has contributed to my doctoral thesis, ‘The British Student Movement from 1965 to 1972’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 1997). Some of it also formed part of a paper entitled ‘British Student Protest in the 1960s’, which was given at the Coming Down Fast! Replaying the 1960s conference, at the University of Wolverhampton on 12 July 1998. I am grateful for the constructive comments and response toward the paper at this conference. I am also indebted to the advice and support of Professor Carolyn Steedman, Professor Gwynne Lewis, Dr John Stevenson, Dr James Hinton, my former colleagues at the Open University, and the staff and students of the History Department at the University of Nottingham. As ever, thanks are due for the proof-reading and suggestions of Gabriele Thomas-Neher of Nottingham University. 1 Quoted in Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London, 1988), 1, from Peter York, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2002, pp. 277–297 © OUP 2002 viewed with affection or horror by some people, and by others they have been dismissed as the irrelevant rantings of an extremist minority or the growing pains of wealthy adolescents. Perhaps more than any other decade, the 1960s have been the subject of myth making. It has even been suggested that ‘most people under forty, in describing the sixties, at least defer to the media sixties’.1 At one of the rare conferences on the 1960s, at the University of Wolverhampton in July 1998, references to the ‘myths of the 1960s’ were made in almost every paper. The student protests of the 1960s are a particularly rich source of such myths, variations of which have also been applied to student protests in numerous countries in Western Europe and North America. By outlining some examples of these myths, analysing them, and then demonstrating their inaccuracy by applying them to examples of the protests, one is forced to reconsider the nature and origins of these protests, and this in turn provides a new understanding of their importance for post-war British society. The research that informs this article concentrated upon two main forms of student protest. This included the wave of sit-ins that affected higher and further education institutions in the late 1960s, such as those at the LSE, and Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Keele, and Leicester Universities in 1968. Research was also carried out upon street demonstrations, such as those against Enoch Powell, those against nuclear weapons, and above all those that targeted the Vietnam War. This latter issue prompted more people to engage in more protests than any other in Britain in the 1960s. This was part of a wider international phenomenon of student protest, and the protests in Britain will be discussed within this wider global context. These protests were a new phenomenon, which took contemporary observers by surprise. For the first time, large numbers of young people challenged the decisions and attitudes of authorities and members of older generations. One commentator lamented that no such thing could possibly have occurred . . . twenty years ago . . . first, because very few of us cared enough about politics; secondly, because we would have regarded such behaviour as a breach of hospitality; thirdly, because we were disposed to be courteous to our elders, even when we despised them; and finally, because in any case at all we should have had more amusing and profitable things to do.2 These protests also defied the usual explanations for protest, since unlike ‘Recycling the Sixties’, reprinted in Style Wars (London, 1980), 182. See also Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs: The Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (London, 1992; first published in 1969), 7–11. 2 Spectator, 19 April 1968, 7. 278 N I C K T H O M A S