1956 - what a year!

 Budapest Oct-Nov 1956

BBC History Magazine asked historians to select history’s most dramatic year. I expected them to select 476 AD, 1215, 1492, 1914 and 1933, but in my opinion 1956 was by far the most dramatic. Historian George Goodwin also selected 1956 and specified the events that changed the world.

1956 marked  a watershed year, one when we began to see the post-war world that was under challenge. It was a time when austerity and cult­ural deference were being replaced by the triumph of American-style mass consumer culture. The 1956 Suez Crisis, when Britain along with France and Israel invaded Egypt to recover control of the Suez Canal, was arguably one of the most significant episodes in post-WW2 British history. It led to periodic changes of national direction! France, in contrast, was already beginning the process of European consolidation: the negotiations to create the European Community of 1957’s Treaty of Rome were effectively decided in 1956.

Further to the east, the Soviet grip on its European conquests seriously faltered for the first time, as it violently suppressed the Hungarian uprising. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators swarmed through the streets, tearing down statues of Stalin, ripping the Communist emblem from Hungarian flags and dodging the gunfire of the secret police. This bloody revolt against the rulers of the Hungarian People's Republic and its imposed policies led to Soviet tanks entering Budapest. The crisis lasted for 12 days, after which the Soviet leadership agreed to a ceasefire and a reformist government under Imre Nagy took over in Budapest. 2,500 Hungarians had died and 250,000 fled as refugees, mainly through Austria (including my sister in law in Melbourne).

The USA's supreme court’s ruling against bus seg­reg­ation was Rev Martin Luther King’s first great civil rights victory. See a famous photo where Martin Luther King was welcomed by his wife Coretta after leaving court in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956. King was found guilty of conspiracy to boycott city buses in a drive to desegregate the bus system, but a judge suspended his fine (pending appeal).

Rev and Mrs Martin Luther King Jr
outside the courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama 1956

The Anglo-American focus on individual expression and liberation, which dominated the following decades, was highlighted by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. And the re-election of the conservative US President Eisenhower could not mask the growth of the free spending, rebellious teenagers with a James Dean poster on the wall and rock and roll on the jukebox – a phenomenon echoed across the English speaking world.

Elvis Presley entered the US music charts for the first time, with Heartbreak Hotel. Rock Around the Clock was a 1956 mus­ical film featuring Bill Haley and His Comets in cinemas every­where. It was one of the major box office successes of that year. The Platters hits throughout 1956 included The Great Pretender, My Prayer, You've Got the Magic Touch, One In A Million and You'll Never Know, changing the life of every teenager in the world. 1956 was a good time to be a university student.

Elvis Presley was changing teenagers' lives
Love Me Tender 1956

But George Goodwin omitted one critical 1956 event. The Olympic Games moved to the Southern Hemisphere for the first time ever! Colonial Britain, France and Spain had long understood that the days of empire were over; the dead soldiers from WW2 had been buried and memorial­is­ed, rationing had ended, and economies could start to develop once again. The huge number of baby boomers, who had been born (1946-55) after their fathers were demobilised, filled the primary schools. Millions of migrants, largely from Europe, were shipped to the southern hemisphere where new suburbs were developed with detached houses on large blocks. The eternal cultural cringe was ending.

State budgets were not open ended of course, but neither were the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne full of community conflict, as they had been in other cities. Everyone in Australia wanted the most modern swimming pools, the best athletic tracks and the biggest Olympic Village for the athletes. To this day, people still say the 1956 Games were the crowning achievement of the Melbourne School of Architecture in the post-war period; they were an inspiration to Rome, Tokyo, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro and every other city competing for later Games.

The 1956 Summer Olympics Games, Melbourne

attendance of 1.153 million people over the 15 days.