1960s Britain

Britain in the sixties was akin to a man at the end of a long hard road of mourning. The fresh scars of World War II still plagued the psyche of the proud nation, but she was still alive. That cagey old lion, Winston Churchill, made it halfway through this decade as if it really was just about passages and the passing of the torch.

As a man in mourning begins to realise after a while, life does go on. The early Sixties brought rumblings of another sort; youth, yearning to be heard. In 1959 the year preceding this prescient decade, this young generation could not relate to the 85-year-old, wheelchair-bounded Churchill and as a result this great man, a stalwart of the nation, was ushered out (some might say unceremoniously ) of the door of public service.

Who could blame the young who yearned for an identity of their own? They were having their own psyches upended by the that mop haired quartet from Liverpool known as the Beatles whose entire band-life ranged from the start of the Sixties until its end, and those straggly Rolling Stones did their raving best, too, to propel this new generation forward. The whole time was about passages. Time to move forward into the future.

It's not that these youth didn't appreciate the likes of Churchill. Quite the contrary. As it was aptly said down through the years and was pertinent at that time, to the victor belongs the spoils. This generation was spoiling to forge ahead with new life, new attitudes. This called for a complete breaking from the horrors of the past. To achieve this turnaround they needed to shed the mores of the day. They needed new hairstyles, longer and more feral, to go with their new music, and new clothes, more colour-splashed and less binding. They heard the rumblings reflected in the spirit-freeing lyrics of the Stones and Beatles, and they went along. They needed to, and they wanted to as well.

The Brits of the Sixties were sharing a parallel odyssey with their brothers and sisters in America, and they even sent them a friendly British invasion by way of thanks. Soon all were learning to enjoy the spoils of their allied quest together. The youth showed the way.