Magdalene College Cambridge Notes: Election Night, 15 October 1964

When Britain went to the polls on 15 October 1964, I had been an undergraduate at Magdalene College, Cambridge for barely two weeks.

The country was voting after thirteen years of Conservative government and, in the months before the election, there had been a widespread feeling that it was time for a change, and that the reinvigorated Labour Party led by Harold Wilson should be given the chance to implement its manifesto of vague modernisation. Becoming a Cambridge student in that era was oddly like entering a cocoon. I bought and read the Guardian (purchase was necessary as Magdalene JCR only took in one copy) but I had no transistor radio. In any case, there was no media notion of "rolling news" and I was necessarily at least twenty-four hours behind with the pace of external events. (Nor, of course, at the age of 19 did I have a vote.) The sense of living in a vacuum seemed to encompass the entire student body, although I remember one enthusiast celebrating Mary Rand's gold medal in the Long Jump at the Tokyo Olympic Games. Nonetheless, enough penetrated our ivory tower to indicate that the election campaign was revealing a sense of a country having second thoughts, hesitating before taking the plunge of changing its government. By election day, it seemed that the result would be close.

The television in the Magdalene JCR (then called the Reading Room; it is now the College Bar) was almost certainly the only set in the College. Although C.S. Lewis, the Professor of Medieval English, had died the previous year, he had threatened that, if a box were ever installed in the Combination Room, his spirit would emerge from the screen to curse the faithless Fellowship. The JCR set was black-and-white, for colour television had not yet been introduced. ITV broadcast its own election night coverage, but in those days the BBC was a trusted national institution and it would have been unthinkable to receive the results from anyone other than the avuncular figure of Richard Dimbleby. I gravitated to the crowded JCR in time to watch the 9 o'clock news. Of course there would be no results for over an hour – in true British spirit, several constituencies staged a race to declare first – but, in those days, the polls closed at nine, and there would be some indications of turn-out, important because Labour supporters were working folk who tended to vote in the evening. Hence, even the weather report – it was a typically damp and gloomy October night – had a potential political significance. Instead there was a breaking story of grim import: reports were coming in that the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev had been ousted in a Kremlin coup, although – not surprisingly – reports from Moscow were sketchy.

To put this surprise development in context, it is necessary to remember that, in the nineteen-sixties, foreign affairs and defence loomed much larger in British political debate than is the case today. Britain was a world power and, more to the point, a substantial section of the electorate might be swayed by international issues. The notion that History repeats itself is generally misleading, but there were similarities between the Conservative Party in the 1964 campaign and its 2024 successor. The Tory leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home (pronounced "Hume") was a decent person, but he was neither a man of the people nor an obvious and inspiring leader. He had emerged as the surprise choice for Prime Minister a year earlier, the compromise product of tensions within the party leadership: in the more gentlemanly days of the nineteen-sixties, "in-fighting" would have been too strong a term. However, Sir Alec Douglas-Home possessed one strong suit denied to Rishi Sunak: he had served as Foreign Secretary, and had been in office during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the negotiations for the first Test Ban Treaty. Had the news from Moscow come a few days earlier, Sir Alec – as everyone called him – would certainly have spoken on television, not as a party leader but in the legitimate guise of an international statesman qualified to issue solemn pronouncements – grave development, uncertain times, need for national vigilance. There were also rumours that China – Red China as it was familiarly known – was about to test its first atomic bomb and thus join the ranks of the nuclear powers. Sir Alec Douglas-Home had used this possibility to urge the folly of changing the government, but it was not until the day after the election, October 16, that confirmation of the actual test was reported. In such a close electoral context, Labour was undoubtedly lucky that these events had not occurred earlier in the week: the news from Russia only came through after most people had voted. Out of office for thirteen years, the party lacked front-bench experience in handling foreign affairs. Furthermore, in its attitude to Britain's nuclear deterrent, Labour was divided, formulaic and unimpressive. I do not recall any discussion in the JCR about the implications of a post-Khrushchev world – we were hardly qualified to have an informed opinion, and even the experts were in the dark – but it was obvious that a major event had taken place, a development that perhaps placed our own concerns in a smaller perspective.    

The energetic socialising of that first fortnight in freshman life had been enough to identify the Labour supporters among the newcomers, for the election was naturally a topic of conversation. I doubt there were more than ten of us in an intake of around ninety. (Labour supporters were generally referred to, and self-identified as, "Socialists". Even among the faithful, there was no definition of the term, as I would discover from the poisonous faction fighting of Cambridge University Labour Club. As a party label, "Socialist" had faded well before its final interment at the hands of Tony Blair.) Magdalene was a predominantly public-school college and it was not surprising that most undergraduates leaned towards the Conservatives. (Indeed, some of the left-wing minority were in revolt against their privileged backgrounds.) But it is important to stress, particularly in view of the climax to election night, that most of the students in my year were essentially apolitical. They cheered for the Tories much as people supported a football club, loyal to the fortunes of the team through thick and thin because the affiliation was in their blood. I do not believe that any member of the Class of '64 took an active part in the University's Conservative Association, even though Magdalene provided CUCA with officers from both its previous and subsequent cohorts, some of whom later became Tory MPs. Indeed, the only contemporary I recall expressing any kind of political ambition was a delightful eccentric who fantasised about standing for Parliament as a Whig: unfortunately, the constituencies that might have elected him had mostly been disenfranchised in 1832. In the JCR that night, those of us hoping for a Labour victory were like away fans at a football match who had accidentally found themselves penned in with the home crowd. Nobody in Magdalene was likely to throw partisan punches, but it still seemed prudent to restrain our enthusiasm. We would later adopt the loose and distinctly paradoxical designation of "the Magdalene Left", but on 15 October 1964 we were present as individuals, not as a phalanx or a caucus. As the evening wore on, we made furtive eye contact with one another to signal silent delight at the trend of the results.

But at first, there seemed little for us to celebrate. (Here I have reinforced my disconnected flashes of memory by consulting Butler and King's The British General Election of 1964: it speaks volumes for my detachment from the arid wastes of the Historical Tripos that this tome  was one of the few hardbacks that I purchased in my undergraduate days. In writing this piece, I was also delighted to discover that the marathon BBC election night coverage can be viewed on YouTube.) The first results, announced just after ten o'clock, showed only low swings to Labour, with the turn-out down in most places since the previous election. We privately cursed the wet weather that had swept across southern Britain after 6 p.m., keeping some Labour supporters at home: the rain had not been blue in colour, but it might as well have been. In politics, most voters shared the football-fan loyalty of young Magdalene Tories, so that the electorate lacked the volatility that it has displayed in the twenty-first century. The Conservatives had won in 1959 with a majority of 97 seats, facing Labour with a mountain to climb even to scrape home as winners. The television pundits were looking to Billericay, the south Essex seat where, despite a considerably increased population, officials had joined the race to declare early. The constituency contained Basildon New Town, making it what in later years would be called a "target seat" for Labour.  When Billericay declared, at around 10.30, the Tories had not only hung on but retained the seat by almost 1,600 votes. Coming from the Essex suburbs myself, I was not particularly surprised, as I well knew that there had been extensive house-building at the Brentwood end of the constituency, where the owner-occupier vote was predominantly Conservative. Billericay was a disappointment but it was unlikely to be typical.

But, as I said, the Magdalene Tories were essentially apolitical: I doubt if many of them had heard of Billericay before that night, and they certainly lacked even my primitive insights into its electoral sociology. The mood in the JCR perceptibly lightened: even the BBC's pundits (some of whom, then as now, made little attempt to hide their anti-Conservative sentiments) were speaking of the possibility of a narrow win for Sir Alec. The illusion did not last long. Shortly before eleven o'clock, the first of a series of Labour gains was announced. Soon, it seemed clear that there would be a change of government. Indeed, the results from urban and industrial marginals apparently promised Harold Wilson a secure parliamentary majority. In the event, the tide would falter in the rural areas that mostly did not declare until the next day, when a handful of hoped-for Labour gains failed to materialise. The new government had a majority of just four in the House of Commons (five allowing for the Speaker), and Britain would go to the polls again within two years. But, by midnight on 15 October 1964, it looked as if Labour had definitely won. Magdalene JCR went quiet, and the less committed political enthusiasts began to slip away to bed.

However, for those of us in the radical ranks who had been following the election campaign, there was one result we awaited with apprehension. In the late nineteen-fifties and early 'sixties, immigration from Commonwealth countries – entirely legal – had begun to create non-white communities in most British cities. With some management of the process by government and a campaign of public education, the fears that the seeming influx aroused among some members of the host community might have allayed: it was already obvious, for instance, that the National Health Service needed doctors from the Indian sub-continent and nursing staff from the Caribbean. Unfortunately, in the absence of any sense of an official grip on the changing demographic situation, local campaigns developed with an agenda that was characterised in a new political adjective: "racialist". (Within a few years, the word would be shortened to its terser and more menacing modern form.) In 1964, the Conservative candidate in the West Midlands constituency of Smethwick mobilised the race issue against the sitting MP, one of Labour's most prominent figures, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, a campaign that had been widely reported with much alarm. When the result came through, it was as bad as had been feared: against the national tide, Labour had lost the seat. The chastened torpor of the Magdalene JCR suddenly evaporated. There was a prolonged burst of cheering, accompanied by a triumphal hammering on the wooden panelling. We of the minority exchanged appalled glances. I had not then and I have not now the slightest doubt that the young men who cheered did not possess any notion of what was at issue for British politics. It is doubtful whether they could find Smethwick on a map or had read anything of the local campaign there. I am also more than willing to believe that, if they had been better informed, few would have approved of the campaign against Gordon Walker, just as the official Conservative Party leadership was uneasy at the development. The outburst was simply an expression of the politics of unquestioning fandom: their team had unexpectedly scored against the run of play, and maybe they might briefly hope for some further miracle before the final whistle.

It was not uncommon in British elections for the victorious party to shed a few of its seats in the moment of triumph. Local issues, poor organisation, unpopular candidates could all place small majorities at risk. In 1964, the race issue played some part in the loss of two knife-edge Labour marginals, but it was probably not the principal factor in either. At Birmingham Perry Barr, where Labour was defending a majority of just 183, the Tories won by 327 votes. The key element here may have been the withdrawal of the Liberals, who had polled over 5,000 votes in 1959. The turnaround at Eton and Slough was even tighter: the Conservatives overcame a Labour majority of 88 to squeeze home by eleven votes. Labour organisers attributed their defeat to the evening showers that had kept their supporters at home, and it was difficult to blame racism for their defeat since the victorious Conservative candidate was Jewish. Of course, the business end of the constituency, in terms of voter numbers, was in Slough but, for Labour partisans, there was some grimly humorous compensation in the news that the Conservatives had gained Eton. In the aftermath of the Conservative defeat, Sir Alec Douglas-Home looked more than ever dinosaur-like. A new generation of middle-class, technocratic Tory politicians seemed poised to take control of the party, ensuring that he would be the last–ever British Prime Minister to hail from Eton. So it would prove to be for the next four decades, long enough to permit not one but two Etonian Conservatives eventually to portray themselves as outsiders in order to recapture the leadership. Labour also lost one of its few rural seats, South-West Norfolk, which had see-sawed between the two parties since 1945. Here the most likely explanation is that radical farm labourers were being replaced not by immigrants but by tractors. The intervention of a no-hope Independent may also have helped to blow away the 78-vote Labour majority.

But Smethwick was a very different case. A mixed industrial and residential constituency, it had certainly not proved a rock-solid Labour seat in 1959. Nonetheless, a majority of three-and-a-half thousand ought to have provided a secure base for a comfortable return five years later. Patrick Gordon Walker had represented Smethwick for nineteen years. His vote had steadily fallen, suggesting that there was no great enthusiasm for this herbivorous former Oxford don, but voters generally liked having an MP who was marked for high office, and he ought to have benefited from a certain sense of British fair play that tended to net sympathetic support for an incoming cabinet minister.  Gordon Walker's defeat, by almost two thousand votes, marked the arrival of a new and dangerous element in British public discourse. The uninformed hammering on the wooden panels of the JCR that greeted his defeat just before midnight on 15 October 1964 remains a sad memory.

The sequel to that seismic election night quickly turned to anticlimax. At nineteen years of age, I was no doubt naive even if not markedly idealistic. Nonetheless, there was briefly something in the air that faintly recalled Wordsworth's memory of the early days of the French Revolution: bliss was it in that dawn.... It did not last. Eight years later, I arrived in Canberra to take up an academic post a few days after the election of the Whitlam Labor government. I found my new colleagues entranced by their hopes that, after twenty-three years of right-wing rule, it would be possible to build a new and better Australia. Their idealism gave me a cold sense of déjà vu, a fear that they too would be disappointed – although nobody could foresee how quickly and cruelly their vision would be swept away. Back in 1964, the new Wilson government was batting itself in during my exciting and bewildering first Term at Magdalene. The College was addictive, and it could not fail to command some degree of exasperated affection. Yet, sixty years ago, Magdalene was undoubtedly idiosyncratic and – let me put this as tactfully as I can – such elements of intellectual dynamism as it possessed were not uniformly distributed among either its senior or its junior members. And it was abundantly clear that Magdalene was not likely to change – or be changed – any time soon. Very quickly, I realised that, even if it might be possible to turn Britain into Utopia (whatever that might look like), the process was going to take a very long time.

Sixty years on, Magdalene has spectacularly renewed itself, but that Utopia briefly glimpsed in the autumn of 1964 remains as remote – and indefinable – as ever.

+++

Revised, 18 October 1964. In an earlier version, I mistakenly stated that the shock news on the evening of October 15 was the Chinese nuclear test. Memory can be fallible. There are further memories of sixty years ago in "Magdalene College Cambridge in 1964: a reminiscence in photographs": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/389-cambridge-images-1964.  

I appreciate the friendly interest in the Magdalene material on www.gedmartin.net shown by many members of the College, but (as always) I stress that my various narratives and speculations are the result of a personal interest in Cambridge history and are neither commissioned nor endorsed by the institution. Around thirty Internet essays and notes relating to the history of Magdalene College are listed on: https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/372-magdalene-history-on-ged-martin-s-website.