Of all the immigrants arriving in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century, none attracted as much attention from whites as West Indian men. This was initially explicable by their being the first nonwhites to settle in large numbers. Around ten thousand arrived during the Second World War (more than Britain's entire prewar black population) and, although some two-thirds of them were hurriedly repatriated after 1945, returning ex-servicemen formed the majority of passengers disembarking from the Empire Windrush on 21 June 1948: year zero for mass black immigration. For the following decade, most of the Commonwealth immigrants coming to Britain each year were West Indian, and, of these, men outnumbered women by a ratio of roughly two to one.'In the late 1950s and 1960s, as their womenfolk joined them and as South Asians formed an ever-increasing proportion of new arrivals, it became clear that the prominence of West Indian men was more than merely numerical. It was cultural, stemming from the fascination-cumrevulsion of whites who customarily regarded them as vicious, indolent, violent, licentious, and antifamilial. These qualities were thought to differentiate them from their South Asian counterparts, who overcame an unsavory reputation acquired in the fifties to be viewed as the new Jews, placid and hard-working family men whose strict endogamy nullified MARCUS COLLINS is Sir James Knott Fellow in History at the University of Newcastle. He wishes to thank

The ®gure of the gentleman and his allied qualities of amateurism, sportsmanship and self-control dominated public discussions of Englishness in the half century after the Great War. From 1918 to the mid nineteen-®fties, gentlemanliness enjoyed strong, although by no means unanimous, support among commentators on national character. Subsequently, however, the reputation of the gentleman suered irreparable damage at the hands of a post-war generation seeking scapegoats for the country's perceived economic, geopolitical and moral decline. This article seeks to explain when and why gentlemanliness lost its reputation as the exemplar of Englishness, and the consequent eects on national culture and identity.The most remarkable thing about the character of the English', observed one Indian commentator in the nineteen-forties,`is the zeal for writing essays about the English character'. In mid twentieth-century England, a host of boosters and doom-mongers, flag-wavers and foreigners, academics, dissidents and small-time propagandists produced a prodigious and generally undistinguished literature which purported to describe, but often sought to shape and control, the nature of English (and British) national character. Although once known for their unreflective complacency, these works have, for close to half a century, been almost exclusively self-critical meditations upon the nation's decline. A whole declinist culture has emerged around them, from the escapist and elegiac`heritage industry' to the savageries of political satire. A country accused of`self-admiration' in the forties appeared thereafter to be transfixed by its own sorry fall. 1 1 Cited in`The English character', Times Literary Supplement (7 Aug. 1948), 427. For the culture and politics of decline, see M. J. Wiener, English Culture and the

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This article explores how the Rolling Stones, as the most famous sixties rock band to survive the seventies, capture the changing nature of permissiveness across the two decades. The first section examines their continued opposition to what they perceived to be the anti-permissive forces of church, state and censorship in the seventies, though they moderated their antipathy to the music industry. The second section assesses how the Stones attempted to fashion their private lives along libertarian lines. It argues that, although they relished the unprecedented freedoms afforded to them as seventies rock stars, they risked becoming the victims of their own excess. The Stones therefore exemplify how permissiveness at once expanded in the seventies and lost much of its radical charge.This article explores how the Rolling Stones, as the most famous sixties rock band to survive the seventies, indicate that permissiveness at once expanded in the seventies and lost much of its radical charge. In the sixties, the manner in which 'the Stones symbolise[d] the new permissiveness' {Oz Sheet 1, May 1967) attracted more public comment than their music, and reactions to the band helped to define the limits of the 'permissive society'. The legal authorities permitted their manager Andrew Loog Oldham in 1965 to suggest that fans should mug the blind in order to buy the latest Stones LP (Hansard 1965), but deemed it impermissible for singer Mick Jagger, lead guitarist Brian Jones and bassist Bill Wyman to urinate on a garage wall that same year. Journalists likewise used the Stones as a means of exploring a series of moral quandaries. 'Would You Let Your Sister Go with a Roll-