It was 60 years ago today...

To mark a friend's 60th birthday, and because why the hell not, I'm taking a quick step 60 years back in time. 

It's Wednesday 22 February 1961, and Rubber Ball by Marty Wilde is at the top of the UK singles chart. Wilde (born Reginald Leonard Smith), is one of Britain's foremost American-inspired rockers, along with those other young Turks, Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.  Here's a vido of Marty performing his hit with Cliff Richard on the 23rd of February 1961 (look out for the Buddy Holly-inspired vocal stylings):

As of now, Marty, like his more famous partner in that duet, is still with us. As his Wikipedia entry notes:

On 9 October 2020, Wilde entered the UK Albums Chart at number 75 with Running Together. It was released on his own Pushka label, and featured his daughters Kim and Roxanne Wilde, with input from son Ricky. Wilde thus has the distinction of UK chart success, as either a singer or songwriter, across eight consecutive decades.

Hint: it's never too late...

The UK's Conservative, old Etonian Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan has just completed four years in office, having taken over from Anthony Eden as a result of Eden's failing health and fatally damaged reputation after the national humiliation of Suez. 

As in February 2021, the USA has a new Democract with Irish ancestry in the White House, although JFK is a sprightly 43 years old when taking office, a contrast with Jo Biden's venerable 78 years. The world didn't know it on February 22nd, but the new Kennedy administration already had a mini Suez-style fiasco of its own in the planning stage, as Kennedy and his advisors weigh up the options for the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion (spoiler; none of the options are good).

 Also in the States, February 22nd sees the release of the biopic The Great Impostor, starring Tony Curtis as the serial impostor Ferdinand Waldo Demara, whose career of deception ncluded faking the identities of a doctor of psychology, a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a teacher, a monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a naval surgeon.

The real (?) Demara had some interesting tips for aspiring rogues:

"...if you come into a new situation (there's a nice word for it) don't join some other professor's committee and try to make your mark by moving up in that committee. You'll, one, have a long haul and two, make an enemy."

Why try to rise up through the existing committee structure, Demara reasoned, when you can start your own committee?

"That way there's no competition, no past standards to measure you by. How can anyone tell you aren't running a top outfit? And then there's no past laws or rules or precedents to hold you down or limit you. Make your own rules and interpretations. Nothing like it. Remember it, expand into the power vacuum!"

Which is quite an interesting take from a couple of angles. Firstly, the notion of moving into vacant ecological niches clearly has wider applications than just con artistry; from starting a business venture to chosing an area of academic research, to your chosen form of artistic expression, it's a legitimate strategy.

Secondly, it's interesting to look back at the career of a genuine outsider from 2021, a historical moment where even our impostors are fake. Demara came from a formerly prosperous family which had fallen on hard times due to the Great Depression by the time he ran away from home aged 16 to become a Cistercian monk. To succeed as an impostor, Demara had to use his wits to practice his deceptions.

In contrast, our highest-profile contemporary rogues, from Donald J Trump, to Nigel Farage (currently running an investment grift which recycles his old "take back control" schtick), to pro-virus activist and professional whiner, Laurence Fox, tend to come from firmly establishment, often elite, backgrounds.

Caveat emptor.

Our most notorious contemporary deceivers aren't outsiders, shrewdly taking advantage of gaps in the hierarchy which others weren't smart enough to spot. They're insiders, born to privilege, leveraging their connections within existing power structures, rather than adroitly spotting and exploiting gaps in those structures. Their biggest, and most successful, con is to convince their dupes that they're the plucky outsiders taking on the establishment, when they are the establishment.

Perhaps the most egregious example is Alexander Boris de Pfeffle Johnson, a man who couldn't be more part of the establishment furniture if he was one of the leather armchairs in White's of St James's. The problem with these fake impostors, as opposed to real rogues like Demara, is that there's no selective pressure on them to have any actual talent. Where your deceptions succeed or fail purely on the basis of your own sharpness of wit, you gotta be good to be at the game. 

Whatever his morals, or lack thereof, Demara was smart, and not just at being an impostor. For example, while pretending to be a naval surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy he actually managed to be a pretty competent naval surgeon:

What Demara did possess was a strong intellect, plus a phenomenal memory. Posing as [Dr Joseph] Cyr, he performed numerous minor surgeries, including dental work on the infected tooth of CAYUGA’s commander, Captain James Plomer. Demara apparently studied up on the necessary techniques by reading text books and relying on the help of his Sick Berth Attendant, plus generous supplies of anesthetic and antibiotics.

Following a commando-style raid off the west coast of Korea, three seriously wounded casualties — all South Korean guerillas – were brought aboard CAYUGA. Cyr aka Demara is said to have removed a bullet from a man’s chest and amputated a foot. His patients not only survived, but Cyr’s fellow officers were so impressed with his coolness that they planned to put his name forward for a medal. Talk of such an award, and the attention surrounding his Korean exploits, was probably Demara’s undoing.

The Canadian Navy apparently discovered Demara was using a false identity after the real Dr. Cyr’s mother spotted a news report in her local paper. War correspondents had picked up the story of the CAYUGA medic and broadcast it far and wide.

Source: The Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum web site.

You can fake a lot, but you can't fake that level of basic competence. 

But fake impostors like Boris "not really my first name" Johnson don't have to keep it real, relying on contacts, wealth & more general social capital, rather than quickness of wit. When a fake impostor buys his way into power, what you can end up with is someone without the basic competence or work ethic to carry out the role he's blagged his way into. 

It would be a stretch to imagine Boris Johnson rising to the occasion, as Ferdinand Demara did in the medical bay of HMCS Cayuga, when Johnson, even with the combined resources of the Prime Ministers' office, the Conservative Party and mostly compliant meda behind him, struggles to rise to the level of impersonating a guy who can successfully operate a mop:

Mop top in mop flop.

That's not to say that Demara was some kind of hero,  a Robin Hood figure. He described his own motivation as being "Rascality, pure rascality." But most of us have a sneaking regard for the exploits of the cheeky rascal, hence the box office draw of Tony Curtis, or Leonardo de Caprio retelling the stories of real-life tricksters like Demara, or Frank Abagnale. 

But it still stings to see not-very bright establishment insiders fraudulently appropriating the persona of the clever rogue and visiting the fruits of their incompetence on the rest of us.

tl;dr: inequality of opportunity tends inevitably towards kakistocracy. Grow your talent pools, people.

In 1961, in the UK, the talent pool was on the shallow side in other senses. After being recuruited into a wide range of responsible and challenging jobs in the war, the 1950s was somthing of a low point where either low-status work or low-status housewifery was seen as the default social position for half of the population. 

The introduction of the birth control pill with its upside of greater reproductive autonomy (and downside of assumed sexual availability) was still the best part of a year away in early 1961. It wouldn't be until 1964 that a revision to the Married Women's Property Act gave married women the right keep half of any savings they'd made from the allowance paid to them by their husbands (bear in mind that, in many workplaces, it was still the norm for women to be forced give up work on marriage at this time). And, as for abortion this wasn't legalised until 1967 and, in Northern Ireland, abortion rights are still a high profile battleground in 2021. 

As in sexual politics, racial politics was also a story of systematic exclusion for a whole section of society. 1961 was the year when Mahesh Upadhyaya arrived from Aden (now south Yemen) to a UK where minority citizens looking for lodgings were still routinely greeted by signs reading "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish." 

There was nothing particularly remarkable about Mahesh when he arrived in the UK, but he would go on play his part in the history of his adopted nation in 1968, when he became the first person to bring a racial discrimination case under the newly-introduced Race Relations Act. Mahesh related the following story:

After I found a job with a regular salary I set about searching for a suitable home for my family. We found one on Penistone Road, at the edge of Huddersfield, close to my employer’s transport routes.

 I arranged an appointment and everyone, my parents, brother, my wife and myself, went along. We found no problems at all with the house, a spacious three-bedroom semi, and wanted to make an offer. So I rang the developers, George Haigh & Sons, later that day.

The person on the phone said, “Are you the coloured family who had a look around earlier?”

I said that we were.

The person on the phone said, “Our policy is not to sell to coloured people because that will jeopardise the sales of our other properties.”

Sadly for Mahesh, he had to face hostiity at work for having the temerity to bring his case to court at all and the outcome of his case was to be dismissed on a technicality. But Mahesh remains proud of his decision to speak out, saying "I’m proud to have been a part of such an important milestone in the UK’s evolution towards being a fairer society."

For LGBTQ citizens it was a similar time of limbo, with equality still a distant dream, but with hints of the first stirrings of a move away from automatic prejudice and exclusion. At least it was for gay men, still suffering from the effects of Nineteenth legislation which their lesbian peers had been spared, thanks to Victorian prudery (the prudery didn't come from Victoria herself, contary to popular belief):

The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Report, was published in 1957, three years after the committee first met in September 1954. It was commissioned in response to evidence that homosexuality could not legitimately be regarded as a disease and aimed to bring about change in the current law by making recommendations to the Government. Central to the report findings was that the state should focus on protecting the public, rather than scrutinising people’s private lives.

It took 10 years for the Government to implement the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Backed by the Church of England and the House of Lords, the Sexual Offences Act partially legalised same-sex acts in the UK between men over the age of 21 conducted in private.  Scotland and Northern Ireland followed suit over a decade later, in 1980 and 1981 respectively. The Sexual Offences Act represented a stepping stone towards equality, but there was still a long way to go.

 From A Short History of LGBT rights in the UK by Steven Dryden.

Over the last sixty years, the general direction of travel in terms of equality in terms of gender, race and sexuality has been clear and encouraging. Which is a cause for modest celebration, rather than the noisy wailing coming from those noisy, well-connected fake outsiders:

"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

 I don't go for nostalgia in a big way. Sometimes the familiarity of the past can feel reassuring, but it's always worth remembering that there are bits that were bad, have got better and can continue to get better if we live in the present, not the past. 

But, when it comes to pretenders, the modern ones really are rubbish and some of the old ones really were great...

 

 

*Update: Now I've seen it and cannot unsee it, it would be remiss of me not to add this clip of Boris Johnson disinfecting a chair, set to one Richard Attenborough's wildlife narrations, to that picture of him ineffectually moving a mop around:

Can’t stop watching Boris Johnson being narrated by David Attenboroughpic.twitter.com/CcQr9U1WHr

— Gregory Bufithis 🇬🇷 🌊 (@GregBufithis) February 20, 2021