Swing into the '60s:
1960
The Films:
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
Directed by Karel Reisz the movie Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was written by Alan Sillitoe and based on his novel of the same name. Arthur Seaton is played by Albert Finney; Rachel Roberts plays the married woman he impregnates, and Shirley Anne Field plays Doreen. His dubious ‘Nottingham’ accent aside Finney makes a fine Seaton, the individual rebelling against authority and social expectations. Much of the location filming took place in Nottingham where the story is set. The film, which proved a huge success and became a classic of the kitchen-sink genre, was given an X certificate on release and banned in Warwickshire. Karel Reisz and Shirley Anne Field attended the provincial premiere at Nottingham’s ABC cinema.
Sons and Lovers (1960)
Nottingham and London shared the UK premiere of the movie
Sons and Lovers, adapted from D H Lawrence’s 1913 novel. Set in an English
mining town – and partly filmed in Eastwood and the city centre – the film
follows Paul Morel (played by American Dean Stockwell), a young would-be artist
inhibited by his emotionally domineering mother (played by Wendy Hiller) and
his angry, alcoholic father (played by Trevor Howard). Joan Collins had been
named in the cast in 1959 but she never made it to the movie. It’s a
coming-of-age tale in which Paul Morel attempts to escape the limits of his
coal-mining town and the suffocation from his mother. For Sons and Lovers
Freddie Francis's cinematography won him an Academy Award and Jack Cardiff received
a Best Director nomination.
Harris's Requiem (1960) by Stanley Middleton
Nottingham schoolmaster Stanley Middleton’s novel is about a
Beechnall schoolmaster, and Beechnall is really Nottingham, keeping up? Thomas
Harris is also a composer of classical music and harbours hopes of his talent
finally getting the recognition it deserves with his great requiem for the
forgotten, written after his difficult father dies. The plot is an
unpredictable path of personal highs and lows. Harris’s honesty and
unwillingness to play ball provide much friction and his self-doubt and
anxieties ring true. Middleton brings a strong Nottingham voice and sense of
humour to the writing.
Stanley Middleton was a prolific writer and would go on to
win the Booker prize but this book remains one of his best.
I’m Thomas Harris I am. I’m somebody. (from Harris’s
Requiem)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence
The book tells of Lady Chatterley's passionate affair with
Mellors, the family gamekeeper, and details their erotic meetings. The affair
is extramarital, for Connie is tied to the emotionally distant and physically
hampered Sir Clifford Chatterley. Lawrence wrote three versions of this book:
the first is known as The First Lady Chatterley, the second John Thomas and
Lady Jane and finally Lady Chatterley's Lover, first published in Italy in
1928. The manuscripts contain similar plots but the characterisations vary and
the dialogue widely differs. The unexpunged edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
was not published openly in Britain until 1960 after a famous trial (see below)
following which the book quickly sold three million copies.
Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the
body, and the body hates and resists the mind. (from Lady Chatterley's Lover)
The Trial:
In 1960 Penguin were intending to publish a set of works by
D H Lawrence to commemorate the 30th anniversary of his death. The year before,
the government had introduced the Obscene Publications Act that said that any
book considered obscene by some, but that could be shown to have ‘redeeming
social merit’, might still be published. So, Penguin, knowing that a ban
prevented their planned publication, sent twelve copies of Lady Chatterley’s
Lover to the Director of Public Prosecutions challenging him to prosecute. He
did, leading to a six-day trial at the Old Bailey. The nation was gripped.
The defence produced 35 witnesses, including leading
literary figures. One eyewitness described the trial as a “circus so hilarious,
fascinating, tense and satisfying that none who sat through all its six days
will ever forget them”. Penguin won the trail allowing publication of the
unexpunged version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Britain would never be the same
again.
Julie Myerson, the reviewer, columnist and author of fiction
and non-fiction, was born in Sherwood, Nottingham in 1960. She grew up in
several locations within the city and county and attended the Nottingham Girls’
High School. In her book Home (2004) the author recalls almost every Nottingham
house she’d ever lived in.
1961
Key to the Door by Alan Sillitoe (1961)
Following the explosive Saturday Night and Sunday Morning we
hear more of the Seatons in Alan Sillitoe’s third book Key to the Door, but
this time the focus in on Arthur’s older brother Brian. It’s a story of
struggle on the grim streets of Nottingham, a time of economic challenges.
Young Brian – formerly a little bogger, allus reading (stolen books) – has
become a man, separating his time between the local boozers and the cardboard
factory. He soon gets ‘involved’ with a woman but Malaya awaits. Political
ideas formed in working-class Nottingham present personal conflict during the
war. This is Sillitoe on familiar turf.
She could hardly believe it had happened like it had, and that
she was in such a fine bleddy mess; and it was impossible not to spend the next
hour brooding on it, going back over the last few years and picking them to
pieces as if they were the components of a complex lock that, once opened,
might solve something. (from Key to the Door)
Albert Finney, who starred as Arthur Seaton in the film
version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, returned to Nottingham in 1961 to
appear at the Theatre Royal in John Osborne’s new stage play Luther. Finney
took the lead role, playing one of history's greatest religious thinkers and
revolutionaries. Like Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, the
play is an intense psychological study of a flawed anti-hero, pitted against
his world.
1962
The Just Exchange by Stanley Middleton (1962)
The publisher Hutchinson released Stanley Middleton’s The
Just Exchange in 1962. They had first published the then 38-year-old Nottingham
author four years earlier under their new author scheme. Middleton began to pen
a novel a year for Hutchinson, something he would continue to do for decades to
come. This book was sandwiched by novels that explored compelling sexual
attraction as the sole basis for a relationship in what was a good spell for
the author. The Just Exchange came on the back of two of his finest works
Harris’s Requiem and A Serious Woman. At the time of writing the book Middleton
has just moved from Bulwell to a larger house in Sherwood.
__________
Alan Sillitoe’s short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner appeared on screen in 1962. Directed by Tony Richardson the film starred
Tom Courtenay as the defiant hero Colin Smith, with Michael Redgrave the smug
governor that picks him for the prestigious challenge cup athletics
competition. James Bolam and a twenty-year-old John Thaw also make the cast in
this tale of a rebellious youth sentenced to a boy’s reformatory for robbing a
bakery. Sillitoe also wrote the screenplay.
1963
Honest to God by John A T Robinson (1963)
Bishop Robinson had received criticism from his church in
1960 after he rallied to the defence of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady
Chatterley's Lover at the famous obscenity trial. In his court testimony
against the censorship, Robinson claimed that it was a book which "every
Christian should read”. He caused a greater stir in 1963 with his own
million-selling book Honest to God. In his book, the Anglican Bishop challenged
traditional Christian theology, controversially questioning the ‘mythical’
nature of the biblical concepts of God, Jesus and prayer. To bring these
concepts into a scientific/space age Robinson proposed abandoning the notion of
God being ‘out there’ preferring the notion of God as ‘Love’. It should be more
a case of intended metaphor rather than people taking words literally, argued
Robinson.
The final psychological, if not logical, blow delivered by
modern science and technology to the idea that there might literally be a God
‘out there’ has coincided with an awareness that the mental picture of such a
God maybe more of a stumbling-block than an aid to belief in the Gospel. (from
Honest to God)
_________________
The 'new' Nottingham Playhouse on Wellington Circus was
opened in 1963 by Lord Snowdon, with a gala performance featuring excerpts from
Coriolanus, which opened the following evening. The cast included John Neville,
Leo McKern, Michael Crawford and a young Ian McKellen.
In this significant year for Nottingham theatre, the
playwright (and screenwriter) William (Billy) Ivory was born in Southwell.
Nottinghamshire has had a strong influence on the award-winning writer and this
is evident in his work.
1964
Anarchy 38, Freedom Press (1964)
Anarchy was a monthly journal that ran for more than ten
years. In 1964 there was a Nottingham issue which included amongst its
contributors Alan Sillitoe (with a piece entitled Poor People), Philip Callow
(on Nottingham United), and Ray Gosling (with Robin Hood Rides Again), who
wrote about the rebel scene in Nottingham and his part in it. Freedom Press was
founded in 1886, making it one of the oldest anarchic publishing houses in the
world. This Nottingham issue was republished by Five Leaves Publications as one
of their series of Occasional Papers.
Nottingham unites things for me, more than any other place.
(Philip Callow from Anarchy 38)
I have nothing to lose, no reputation, no business, no
property – and I can afford to say just what I please. A Council wouldn’t work
at all with many madmen – but without one or two fearless little men it can get
too big for its boots and DIE. (Ray Gosling from Anarchy 38)
_____________
It was in 1964 that it was revealed that Enid Blyton’s Noddy
and Big Ears books had been banned from Nottingham libraries. The Nottingham
Public Libraries Committee unanimously stood behind their City Librarian who
defended the decision. In the previous nine years no Enid Blyton books had been
bought for our libraries’ children’s sections. In total, Nottingham Public
Libraries only stocked one of Blyton’s books, a collection of bible stories.
So, despite the popularity of Noddy and Big Ears, there was no shelf space (or
should that be elf space?) to be found for their adventures.
_____________
Frank Dunlop directed a play version of Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning for the Nottingham Playhouse. Ian McKellen starred as Arthur
Seaton but, like Albert Finney before him, he didn’t quite capture the
Nottingham accent. For inspiration, McKellen had visited Mrs Sillitoe in the
back-to-back terraced house where Alan had been brought up but the actor didn't
watch the 1960 movie. McKellen described Arthur Seaton as “an engaging lout,
anti-everything except his own gratification with women, drink and boisterous
pleasure. I couldn’t have been less like him but I ran with the part." He
added that, "The sets were large and evocative of the city that the
audience and actors lived in.”
1965
Start Somewhere by Michael Standen (1965)
Michael Standen, a former pupil at High Pavement School,
used his schooldays as inspiration for his successful debut novel. Set in
Nottingham in the early 1960s, Start Somewhere follows a group of teenagers as
they enter adulthood. It opens with humorous high jinks in the Arboretum as we
get to know eighteen-year-old Frank Griffin, his mates and his working-class
family. Attitudes around social class are well observed, the parents’ views and
those of the grammar school students providing a mix of changing expectations
and behaviours, and teenage romance adds a coming-of-age air to this enjoyable
read, republished by Nottingham’s Shoestring Press in 2009.
The policeman looked up. Frank had the sensation of their
eyes meeting somewhere in the shadow of that helmet. He jumped, running. (from
Start Somewhere)
Cecil Roberts became the first author to be named one of the
honorary Freemen of the City of Nottingham. He received the title at the
Council House in the May of ’65. As a fifteen-year-old, Roberts had worked
beneath the Council House - when it was the equally grand Exchange Building -
as a clerk in the Market and Fairs Department. Young Roberts was based in a
cubby-hole; bereft of daylight and fresh air he endured the smells coming from
the butchers in the bloody Shambles, the stalls of poultry and the nearby penny
lavatories. Roberts was the only author to be granted a Freeman of Nottingham
title during the 20th Century. He later discovered that a mouse had nibbled up
his ceremonial scroll. In 2008 Alan Sillitoe became this century’s only writer
to receive the honour.
1966
The Red Towers of Granada by Geoffrey Trease (1966)
It’s 1290 and a sixteen-year-old scholar by the name of
Robin has been branded a leper. This leads to him being made an outcast by his
church and community. After coming to the aid of an elderly man in Sherwood
Forest, Robin finds a friend. This man is Solomon, a Jewish doctor, and they
travel to Nottingham’s Jewish Quarter where Robin’s skin disorder is treated.
The two heroes embark on an exciting mission for the Queen that involves a
quest for the Elixir of life that takes them to the Moorish Spain of Cordoba
and Granada. The Red Towers of Granada was republished by Macmillan in 1992.
It is a strange and terrible thing to listen to one's own
funeral service... (from The Red Towers of Granada)
The Jewish Quarter mentioned above was between Hounds Gate
and Castle Gate, an area Trease was familiar with. To this day the Trease
family’s wine merchants’ business, Weavers, is still trading on Castle Gate.
It’s now run by brother and sister Philip and Mary Trease, the 5th generation
of the family.
_____________
It was in 1966 that the Nottingham Film Theatre first opened
its doors to the public; the first in a wave of Regional Film Theatres to be
established around the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With BFI
sponsorship it began screening films three days a month. This was at 14-18 Broad
Street, now the much more comfortable Broadway Cinema, back then the building
was split between the chapel, which housed the cinema, and the church house,
where the admin offices were. A New York-style alleyway ran between the
buildings and a homeless man slept on the fire escape.
1967
A Tree on Fire by Alan Sillitoe (1967)
The second of Alan Sillitoe’s William Posters Trilogy, A
Tree on Fire received a more favourable reception than the first. It's an
existential investigation of protest and revolution in 1960s North Africa and
England. There are two plots, one involving Frank Dawley, the anarchist
antihero of The Death of William Posters, who has disappeared into the African
desert, fighting for Algerian independence against French troops; and another
involving Albert Handley, an idealistic painter whose talent has made his fame.
It’s not just the proletariat that are fighting social expectations in A Tree
of Fire, the novel also features middle-class housewives rebelling against the
empty monotony and meaningless direction of their lives.
To understand people, go into the desert, and do not come
out until you understand yourself. (from A Tree of Fire)
_______________
During the second half of the 20th Century, The
Evening/Nottingham Post lead the newspaper industry into the digital age. It
was in 1967 that Nottingham’s premier newspaper became the first in Britain to
publish computer-set editorial and advertising text. This paved the way for the
full computerisation of newspaper production. Within the next decade The Post
would become the first newspaper in Britain to introduce direct computer
inputting from journalists.
1968
Old Nottingham by Malcolm I Thomis (1968)
Between 1968 and 1994 Malcolm I Thomis wrote eighteen
non-fiction books, many of which are of local interest. Thomis’ works include
The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England, Women in Protest, 1800-1850,
and Politics and Society in Nottingham, 1785-1835. First published in an
attractive hardback edition by David and Charles in 1968, Old Nottingham is a
study in the local history of the city. It is mainly concerned with period from
1750-1968 with an emphasis on social and economic history. There's special
reference to the (then) visible remains of yesteryear.
________________
The dramatist Amanda Whittington was born in Nottingham in
1968. The former Nottingham Evening Post columnist has written over 30 plays
for UK theatre and radio. Her debut play, Be My Baby, sheds light on teenage
pregnancy in the sixties, and is studied at GCSE and A-Level English
Literature. Nottingham features in Amateur Girl, the story of a woman who lives
in a Viccy Centre flat. Whittington has also adapted Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning for the stage. A winner of the Dennis Potter Screenwriting Award,
Whittington is a Doctor of Philosophy by Publication, awarded for a programme
of work Bad Girls and Blonde Bombshells.
There’s more cash in here than we earn in a month. It’s a
Robin Hood thing, in’t it? Get in. (from Ladies' Day)
1969
The Unfortunates by B S Johnson (1969)
A journalist goes to an urban city (Nottingham) and heads to
a football ground (the City Ground) to report on a match. Attempts to make his
weekly report are disrupted by memories of the city and of his best friend
Tony, a young victim of cancer. The Unfortunates is a heart-breaking story
which celebrates friendship and reflects on death. Described as ‘a subtle
critique of the self-serving Sixties’ it’s also an honest self-portrayal. The
chapters are presented in twenty-seven unbound packets inside a box, designed
to be read in any order, aside from the first and last sections.
________________
D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is adapted for the big screen
by Larry Kramer. The Ken Russell film starred Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda
Jackson, and Jennie Linden. The plot follows the relationships between sisters
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen and two male best friends in a mining town in
post-World War I England. The film explores the nature of commitment and love.
It’s most famous scene is sparked by a conversation in which Rupert suggests
Japanese-style wrestling: Oliver Reed and Alan Bates strip and proceed to
wrestle naked by the fire. Women in Love was nominated for four Academy Awards,
with Jackson picking up the Best Actress Oscar. The Evening Standard described
it as “The best film this year,” and “A film about all-absorbing human
passion…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=ARDQeNzXCXU
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