The prisoner of duty

No one could have guessed back in 1955, when young Princess Margaret issued that poignant, tortured statement that she was going to give up Peter Townsend, the divorced war-hero she loved for her duty to Church and Commonwealth, that England was just months away from the start of an incredible social revolution. Within 10 years the deferential, class-bound England of the early Fifties had been swept away by a torrent of social change more intense than anything in history. By 1965, the eyes of the world would be hypnotised by the phenomenon known as "Swinging London", dominated by a glamorous "new aristocracy" of working-class pop singers, actors, clothes designers and photographers.

Yet by a quirk of fate a central icon in that transformation would be the same young Princess who 10 years before seemed so completely a prisoner of that dedication to "duty" and tradition now passing rapidly into history.

The revolution which came over English life between the mid-Fifties and the mid-Sixties went through three main phases, and we cannot appreciate how earthshaking it was without recalling just how conservative and traditional was the England of the early Fifties out of which it erupted.

At the time of the Queen's Coronation in 1953, Britain was just recovering from 10 years of war, rationing and austerity. With the first signs of modest prosperity, it seemed in many ways like a return to the days of "pre-war". Britain was still the centre of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The young were still respectful to the old. The lower classes were still deferential to the upper classes.

Crime was at its lowest level ever. Popular music was dominated by sentimental ballads and American crooners. Only a fraction of homes had flickering black-and-white television screens, showing one channel only for a few hours each night. Then for two years, from the autumn of 1955, the foundations began to shake. Commercial television arrived. The beat of rock'n'roll arrived from America. Young people suddenly became "teenagers", with music, fashions and slang all of their own, in rebellion against the stuffy world of the older generation, the "squares".

The staid, middle-class London theatre was rocked by a series of "angry" plays by young writers such as John Osborne, who, like the new generation of rock'n'roll singers, came from the lower classes. By the late Fifties, the first shock of this upheaval had died away.

But Britain was aware that it had entered on an entirely new kind of prosperity. "The affluent society", it was called, as suddenly millions could for the first time buy cars, fridges and televisions, visit the first supermarkets, watch the first modern tower blocks rising over London's skyline.

As Britain launched into this process of headlong change, it was now the turn of the upper classes to lead the revolution in fashions and social attitudes. Young ex-public schoolboys who would earlier have gone into the law or the City were now going into journalism and television, opening restaurants, becoming photographers.

By the early Sixties, the trendsetters were magazines like Queen, run by Jocelyn Stevens, with daring new tricks of designs and grainy, black-and-white pictures. And one of the stars of this image-obsessed new world was the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, with his bohemian disregard for convention and his riverside pied-a-terre in the working-class East End. There could have been no more startling measure of just how fast English society had already changed than when, in 1960, it was announced that this was the young man who was going to marry Princess Margaret. Four years earlier such a breach of Establishment decorum would have been unthinkable.

But the social revolution was now moving faster with every month that passed, and in 1963 came the biggest explosion of all. On the one hand "Old England", presided over by the out-of-touch Edwardian father figure of Harold Macmillan, seemed to be collapsing in a welter of scandals. On the other, four cheeky young lads from Liverpool who overnight became the most glamorous phenomenon in the history of pop music. 1963 was the year when Britain's social revolution exploded. The Beatles were followed by the Rolling Stones, the Animals, The Who and scores of other pop groups. Over the next three years their music became the sound-track to a frenzied obsession with fashionable images of every kind, served by photographers like David Bailey and Terence Donovan, models like Jean Shrimpton, clothes designers like Mary Quant, film-makers like Dick Lester, actors like Terence Stamp and Michael Caine.

By 1965 the change which had come over English life was attracting attention across the globe, above all in America, where London, with its discos, its miniskirts and fashion boutiques in the King's Road and Carnaby Street, its "daring" sex-obsessed theatre, was hailed as "the most swinging city in the world".

And at the heart of this bubble of make-believe, Swinging London was the little group of figures, headed by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who became known as the "new aristocracy". Whenever they were described, certain key adjectives would always appear. They were "irreverent", "informal", "down-to-earth", above all they were "classless". To demonstrate the scale of the social revolution which had engulfed Old England, it was always emphasised how many of them were "working-class" in origin, such as Stamp, Caine and Donovan from the East End (even though the working-class credentials of others, such as Mick Jagger, an ex-student of the London School of Economics, were considerably exaggerated).

But what had happened in this revolution was really a coming together of both those groups which had led the way since Britain first became youth-obsessed in the Fifties. What was striking about the "new aristocrats" being hailed in every colour magazine in 1965 was how they were a mixture of people from both humble origins and the old public-school Establishment.

And in image terms no members of this new classless aristocracy were more conspicuous than that trendy photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, now known as Tony Snowdon, and his wife Princess Margaret, who surrounded herself at Kensington Palace with such stars of the bohemian demi-monde as the actor Peter Sellers and Ken Tynan, the leading champion of those "angry" young playwrights who turned the British theatre on its head in the Fifties.

For the American public there was no more glamorous manifestation of this new swinging Britain. They were transfixed when Britain's beautiful young "swinging Princess" and her husband visited Hollywood in 1965, strap-hanging from a Hollywood bus and mingling with the stars.

In fact, as we now know, her marriage was already heading for the rocks. Over the decades to come, as for other stars of swinging London, the glamour was to melt away into much unhappiness.

But certainly in those few brief years English life had been through the most extraordinary social earthquake in its history, one which in many ways shaped the character and values of the world we all still live in today.

And in that revolution Princess Margaret had her own symbolic and by no means unimportant part.

The Party Princess