Frostquake: How the frozen winter of 1962 changed Britain forever

I enjoyed this book.

The severity of the winter of 62-3 has not been equalled in modern times and came at moment when the country was desperate to move on from a postwar mindset of institutional deference and the social class ruled it (which would have included Juliet Nicolson's forbears. Social change was more or less inevitable and did not come about as a result of three months extreme weather. Financial necessity, a strong sense of community and a stoism forged from recent wartime hardship meant that life carried on. The fact that The Beatles could continue a punishing concert tour around the country underlines how little the weather got in the way of everyday life.I became a teenager more or less as the thaw began, attending a Sussex boarding school that was austere in all weathers and with a few tweaks to the games schedule (house icy hockey replaced rugby) carried on almost as normal and like anyone of my generation remember it as a time like no other.Frostquake’s central claim that change inevitably came about as a consequence of a long winter, a kind of social vernalisation that inevitably would bring about social change is attractive but inadequately supported by the evidence; the Profumo affair, Beeching’s rail cuts, the cold war (unintended pun), the final days of Empire, were major events that took place coincidentally occurred during the first few years of the decade. It is true that for many the last steam trains date back to around this time and that a lifestyle that had changed relatively little since Edwardian times was living on borrowed time.There is a case to be made that the Beatles and teenage culture in general would not have happened had National Service not been abolished shortly before John Lennon would have been required to sign up. Little is made of the extraordinarily obstructive attitude at the BBC who did not create a pop music radio channel until 1968. (every teenager will remember the nightly struggle to tune in to Radio Luxemburg). In fact the breaking of the BBC’s classical and light music hegemony, whilst not really supporting the weather hypothesis, would have underlined the decline of its centralised monopoly. As arbiters of the nation’s cultural taste its Oxbridge stranglehold was severely undermined by the arrival of the working class teenager emerging from the new redbrick universities..Nicolson rightly identifies Private Eye and TW3 as forces that broke the dam of deference for the Establishment (Government, Church, Armed Forces, and the BBC - less so aristocracy). Her survey of the new London fashion scene Mary Quant, David Bailey, etc.) centred on Carnaby street and her Chelsea territory, the Kings Road, was spot-on though she might have mentioned the film ‘Blow Up’ as the seminal essay in capturing the essence of ‘swinging London’ (interestingly, Netflix’s Crown S2;E7 has a near identical feel). Tempting though it is to dwell on personal reminiscences, I would have expected a more severe editorial excising of Joanna Lumley’s recollections and the inexplicably detailed final days of Sylvia Plath.If the reader wants a neat summary of the change that took place between 1962 and '63 he can do no better than note the Times’ critic, William Mann, who identified the Beatles’ ‘Please, Please Me’ album as the major cultural event of 1963 (In retrospect it was a fairly thin offering in the light of what followed). The previous year he had nominated Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which had been written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. That these diametrically opposite cultural beacons; one representing the collective might of the Establishment’s resources; the other a spontaneous explosion of untutored creativity from an Irish immigrant community in the destitute, bombed out Liverpool happened either side of the worst winter in modern history may be coincidental but could form the basis of further and more objective social research.Readable and well researched though it is, Frostquake does not really achieve its central contention that the social revolution of the 1960s came about because we felt cold for longer than anyone could have imagined.

I have enjoyed all the books I have read by Juliet Nicolson so far and I am pleased to say that this is no exception. It centres around the winter of 1962-63, when snow started falling on Boxing Day, 1962, and continued falling for ten weeks. Although I was not born then, my brother was born in March, 1963, and so it was a winter my mother recalled with clarity.In 1962, a new decade was underway, but Post-War Britain still seemed to be ensnared in the fifties. Fog, a lack of optimism, the threat of the Cold War and a still censorious Auntie Beeb, meant that things were going along much as always. By the time the snow had stopped, society would have shifted. The Beatles, who released their first single in 1962, would explode into popularity, Private Eye and 'That Was the Week That Was,' would poke fun at previously off-topic subjects, and attitudes would change.Juliet Nicolson manages to combine a personal memoir, with a social history, which is extremely readable and enjoyable. From JFK, through Profumo and Christne Keeler, Mary Quant, Sylvia Plath, Macmillan, Tara Browne and others, she writes of social, and class, barriers being broken down. Although she discusses sport, politics, ballet and changing attitudes, such as tolerance towards homosexuality, it is music which is central to her story.Before 1963, regional accents were hardly heard on the BBC and possibly only there as a figure of fun (the 'O'ill give it foive' of 'Juke Box Jury') but the Beatles would change all that and much more. As they trundled in their van around the snow covered roads, roadie Neil Aspinall struggling to see through the windscreen, their irreverent humour, original music, and openly Liverpudlian accents, would charm a nation. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings were Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, poised to follow them, with Bob Dylan visiting London for the first time, and older acts, such as Helen Shapiro (even if she was very young) getting ready to exit the stage. Music was about to change from American cover versions to home grown talent and that talent would explode with the melting of the snow. A wonderful read - social history at its best.