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Who are these men and women? Many of them come from the Midlands, from Yorkshire, Manchester and Birmingham, sporting their distinct regional accents like badges—it is no longer necessary to affect an Oxford accent to get ahead. Some of the new voices have a cockney lilt; from London's own working-class East End come Actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, Playwrights Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter, Television Magnate Lew Grade, Textilemen Joe Hyman and Nikki Seekers. Others breeze in from the coal-mining North Country. There are bluff Yorkshiremen like the P.M. or Actor Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney from Manchester, Playwright Shelagh Delaney, who wrote A Taste of Honey in Salford at the age of 18, and Rita Tushingham, 24, a onetime Liverpool typist who played the lead in the 1961 movie. And, of course, Liverpool also produced the four ingenuous teen-agers whose Mersey beat has circled the world, earned them a group fortune that now stands at $6,000,000 and won them medals from Queen Elizabeth.
Foppish Dress. Though London's pendulum now swings with verve and elan, it started to move, as near as anyone can tell, during the Suez crisis of 1956, which many Britons found darker even than the days of the 1940 Blitz. Angry thousands massed among the pigeons beneath Nelson's glowering statue in Trafalgar Square to protest an aging, ailing Tory Prime Minister's final, futile attempt to assert Britannia's right to rule the waves. That same year produced the first explosive act of rebellion: John Osborne's corrosive drama, Look Back in Anger.
Other signs of revolt soon cropped up. Teen-age gangs hit the streets, dressed in sleazy imitations of Edwardian frock coats. The Teddy boys mixed it up in angry race riots with West Indians, who were crowded into rundown districts like Paddington and Netting Hill Gate. Next, boys and girls divided up into foppishly dressed Mods and leather-jacketed Rockers, took to Brighton and Margate on holiday weekends to have a bit of a rumble while their elders rocked with still greater shock over the seamy revelations of the Profumo affair. Suddenly, with Profumo, the veneer of the upper classes finally and irreparably cracked. The working-class man saw that the Tories were not necessarily better or even better-behaved than he just because they appeared to be so. One result was a razor-thin margin of victory for Harold Wilson in 1964.