The age of Mother
Christopher Booker
Reading the plethora of comment on the two books chronicling the rise and fall of Jim Slater, I was struck by the implicit assumption in so many of the reviews that the years of Slater's success, between 1964 and 1975, constituted a kind of selfcontained 'era' in English life which has now receded into the past. Increasingly, those years, the Wilson-Heath-Wilson era, do seem to have had all sorts of qualities which mark them out as a distinct historical, political and social 'sub-period' — just as the years between 1956 (Look Back In Anger and Suez) and 1963 (the fall of Macmillan) formed such a previous distinct entity. Undoubtedly the prevailing climate of that strange and rather unpleasant time has now passed away; its heroes, such as Wilson, Heath, David Frost, the Beatles, Jim Slater, have lost their glamour and faded, if not into obscurity, at least into eclipse. And we can perhaps begin to see the distinctive quality of English life in those years in a new light.
I believe that an important clue to the nature of that period was contained in the fascinating article contributed to these columns three weeks ago by Leo Abse, under the slightly misleading title 'English sexual Politics' — which suggested that a great many of the more puzzling phenomena of politics could be explained, or at least illuminated, by recognising the enormous unconscious !nfluence of the psychology of 'Father' and Mother' on political attitudes. Right-wing Politics, Mr Abse suggested, with their emphasis on discipline, tradition, individualism and leadership, are 'fatheroriented'. Left-wing attitudes, with their emphasis on permissiveness, welfare and corporatism, are 'mother-oriented'. One can see the truth of such an observation all over the political history of our times. One of the supreme examples of a society dominated by the attitudes of the `Terrible Father', for instance, has been Afrikaner South Africa — brutally 'masculine' in its orientation, drawing its strength from a sense of historically-ordained hierarchy Which must be maintained at all costs against a hostile, namby-pamby, decadent, effeminate' outside world. Whereas the attitudes which spring from domination by the 'Terrible Mother' can be seen at their most extreme in the politics of protest — the attitude of children who cannot grow up, Who expect society to protect and shelter them indefinitely, while at the same time shrilly rebelling against anyone or anything Which can be represented as the brutal tyranny of 'Father'.
Certainly an awareness of the unconscious influence of these two great 'oppo sites', these two irrational poles, can help to illuminate a great deal more than just politics; for instance, the world of finance and the City. Normally those serried ranks of soberly-suited men who inhabit the banks, stock exchanges and finance houses of the world are heavily under the influence of `Father'. 'Masculine' qualities such as prudence, firmness and conservatism rule. But from time to time, even such citadels of patriarchy are swept by irrational eruptions of more 'feminine' qualities. Prudence and conservatism are swept aside. There is a sudden heady fascination for intuition, dash, youthful glamour. 'Mothers' boys' emerge as heroes of the hour, who seem to have discovered the secret of conjuring money out of nothing, with none of the stuffy, prudish restraints which normally govern the world of the bank manager. And as the long history of financial scandals shows, from Wall Street in the 'twenties to the crash of the Cornfeld and Slater empires in recent years, such heady intuitive spasms invariably end in disaster, with the reemergence of the grey virtues of 'Father'.
Reading Jim Slater's autobiography, one is left in no doubt that he was psychologically a classic candidate for the role of hero in such an hour. He obviously has a very strong relationship with his mother (that vital ingredient in creating the irresistible self-confidence of so many would-be `world conquering' heroes, from Napoleon to David Frost). Her presence is rarely far away throughout Slater's account of his life, from the early index entry 'encourages Slater to work hard' to the moment of the final crash in 1975, when he writes 'my mother also gave me tremendous moral support'. For such a man no disaster can ever seem so final as to become real. And anyone who might still be wondering why the proposed merger in 1973 between Hill Samuel and Slater Walker to make `the largest merchant bank in the world' did not come off, need only look at the picture on page 198 showing Sir Kenneth Keith, the absolute embodiment of the heavy physical presence of 'Father' (a slightly less grim version of Dr Schleyer), and Jim, the smiling 'mother's boy', to see why in psychological terms alone the merger was bound to be a nonstarter.
But of course it was not just in the City that English life between 1964 and 1975 was so clearly dominated by heroes and qualities with a very pronounced 'feminine' aspect (I hasten to add here that I am not talking about homosexual tendencies, but something quite different, and rather more subtle). It was a period which began with the transmutation of Harold Macmillan from the ‘Supermac' of 1959 into the absolute stereotype of a bumbling, unimaginative, tradition-bound 'Father' who had to be pushed out of the way in 1961-3. And for the next eleven years English life was ruled in countless ways by the very worst qualities associated with an 'age of Mother' — narcissism, self-love, weakness, irrationality and permissiveness in all its aspects, from morals to money. Think of the celebrities of that era — Harold Wilson, the Beatles, Frost, George Best, Slater, Heath. Despite Mr Heath's petulant parodies of masculinity in his `Selsdon phase', and again in the disastrous winter of 1973-4, it was a time when real firmness, rationality, authority and other `male' qualities were at a very low ebb in English life. Under the supreme guiding star of Harold Wilson, the attributes at a premium were all those of the man with a very strong 'feminine' side the pursuit of the outward appearance, guile, winning ways, intuition, conciliation and outward show, punctuated by outbursts of petulance, were the very essence of 'the age of consensus', when no one should take too firm a stand or display too rigorous a set of moral principles on anything. It was altogether an age when 'personality' took precedence over 'character'. And the only really conspicuous flag-bearer for a kind of irrational extreme 'masculinity' of his own in English life during those years was Enoch Powell (with his attendant chorus of racist dockers and 'Father-dominated' Tory ladies).
The symptoms of the collapse of the 'masculine' during this period could be seen in almost every walk of national life — from the reign of a kind of effeminate, unstructured permissiveness in morals, education and the arts (not for nothing was this the heyday of `Pseud's corner'), to the craze which swept politics and industry for every kind of 'corporatism', for building up ever larger, more amorphous groups into which everyone could huddle for protection. The search for 'pseudo-Mothers' in these years took every kind of form, from Wedgwood Benn's setting up of British Leyland to Edward Heath's craving for Britain to become incorporated into the large, sheltering bulk of the European Community, from the 'corporatisation' of local government to the bureaucratisation of the Health Service, and the desire to close down as many small, local, independent hospitals as possible, in order to merge them into huge 'maternal' entities. Now of course we can look back from the vantage-point of the more sober late 'seventies to see how absurd and irrational all this pursuit of bigness for its own sake was. The prevailing climate has changed here as drastically as it has towards the tower block in architecture or the vast, permissive comprehensive school in education, but the damage of the 'age of the Terrible Mother' is done.
One of the most conspicuous symptoms of this weak, self-destructive age was the almost complete collapse of 'fatherly' financial prudence. The belief that money was to be had for nothing infected every kind of group in society, from the City hypnotised by Slater-ism to the town hails on their spending spree, from the get-rich quick property developers of the 'Barber bubble' to the unions in the age of Jack Jones and Mick McGahey. Obviously the bubble of collective financial fantasy which was finally so sharply and disastrously deflated in the great crisis of 1974-6 originated in some ways in the early days of affluence in the mid 'fifties, and had just gone on growing ever since —but it undoubtedly reached its height in the years between Barber's 'easy money' policy of 1971 and the wages spree of 1975, the time when the collapse of 'masculine common sense' in money matters finally . became so widespread and so complete that even Roy Jen kins could in retrospect seem to have played the role of a thoroughly conservative 'Iron Chancellor' in the late 1960s.
Today there are certainly plenty of signs of what the Jungians might call a change in 'the prevailing archetype' in English life. The 'age of Mother' is discernibly in retreat on all fronts, and, whether 'Moses' Callaghan fits his own bill or not; the virtues of masculine rationality and firmness are more in evidence than they were. But perhaps a last epitaph on the period 1964-75 should be left to Antonio Gramsci, in the comment from his Prison Notebooks which is quoted by John Fowles at the opening of his new novel Daniel Martin: 'The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.'
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