Our Times

by A. N. Wilson

  For all the extreme distastefulness of the spies and their attitude to their own country, and their adulation of a system of murder and repression which they wished to spread to the West, they had remarkably little permanent effect on Britain itself. One of the central political paradoxes of our times was encapsulated in this fact. Left-wingery of various colourings might have been considered normal thinking in university common rooms and literary salons. This might have led, and undoubtedly did lead, to many writers and speakers of influence to express unpatriotic sentiments; and it might have led, and undoubtedly did lead, to some disastrous economic policies when a supposedly left-wing government was eventually elected to power in 1963. But in terms of actual infiltration, the Soviet bloc had no influence upon Great Britain at all. Far more wide-ranging changes came to Britain as a result of American, than of Soviet, influence. There is a paradox here, which would see its full flowering in the early twenty-first century among the English ‘neo-cons’: namely that those British patriots who had supported the United States against the Soviet Union in the Cold War found themselves in a position of commending American influences which did far more than Russia to destroy the old British way of life. The brasher of the ‘neo-cons’ of later times would come to welcome this fact, and regard the building of Denver- or Pittsburgh-style skyscrapers in small English towns in as favourable a light as the arrival of American hamburger chains to replace the small independent café. But small-c conservatives were less sure. If a prime objection to the spies and the crypto-Reds was that they were trying to undermine what made Britain British, then could not the same accusation be levelled against Britain’s greatest friend and ally?

  This was one way of putting it. Another way of seeing things would be to suggest that, in the post-war trauma, Britain was undermining itself; it was changing willy-nilly. By this analysis, attempts to ‘blame’ Soviet agents, or American styles of cheap clothes and food and music, mistake the nature of the case. Neither the KGB, nor the Coca-Cola Company, were to be held responsible for something which was more mysterious, more general, a change which in another culture would have been seen as the will of the Fates, or the movement of History.

  3

  Other Gods

  Britain had been changed completely by the war, but it took some while for the depth and range of the alteration to become apparent. The first and greatest of these changes was the economic one. Britain had gone from being one of the richest nations, not only in the world, but in history, to being a country which was bankrupt. It had great industrial, and fiscal, resources, and with the upturn in the world economy of the 1950s, Britain would gradually recover some of its economic, though never its political, strength. But in the immediate post-war years the stagnation of the economy, greatly exacerbated by the experiment of state socialism and nationalisation, disguised from the British some of the more lasting changes in national life.

  Nearly all these changes appeared as benefits, but as each one was eagerly embraced, Britain left behind a little of that esprit de corps which had bound society together so remarkably during the war years. By banishing the ways in which they thought about themselves, the British became less of a group, more a collection of individuals. Not for nothing did the old God of the Hebrews tell His people: ‘Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you’ (Deuteronomy 6:14). In the 1950s the British hungrily, greedily, went after other gods, who supplied them with food, and sexual imagery and music which they voraciously devoured.

  Before exploring this phenomenon, however, we should note a feature which contributed hugely to the slow return of wellbeing which coursed through frozen British veins after the hardships of war and socialist austerity.

  Wars have always expedited technological advance. Archimedes invented the catapult for the Greek army–it was first used with devastating effect at the Battle of Syracuse in 265 bc. Chinese alchemists of the Han dynasty pioneered gunpowder because their military leaders were desperate to assert superiority over their enemies. During the Second World War, the numbers of those involved in the conflict, and the intensity of the fighting, meant that the technological advances were proportionately superior. Consider the development of antibiotics. It was when trying to find a way of combating the devastating post-war influenza pandemic of 1919 that Alexander Fleming had first made his discovery of penicillin. The mould which had grown accidentally during one of his laboratory experiments turned out to be lethal to streptococci, gonococci, meningococci and pneumococci. But having made the discovery, in 1928, Fleming never developed it. The penicillin notatum vanished very quickly in laboratory conditions and he had not the wherewithal to develop it as a packaged pharmaceutical. It was only during the war, in Oxford, that the Australian Howard Florey and German émigré chemist Ernst Chain, together with Norman Huntley, read Fleming’s paper and began to develop the idea of penicillin, testing it on laboratory mice infected with streptococci. When the idea was taken to America, it became possible, after 1944, for penicillin to be produced on a scale to deal with the many infected troops in field hospitals. It was the wonder drug which, as well as curing syphilis and gonorrhoea in a matter of weeks, was to go on to cure millions of patients who would previously have died–of meningitis, pneumonia and other curable diseases.

  The existence of antibiotics, and the growth of the pharmaceutical industry, was a vital factor in the increased wellbeing of the post-war world. Another example of the beneficial effects of war on the advance of technology came out of the Manhattan Project, whose prime aim had been to develop nuclear weaponry, for use against–in the event–Japanese civilians. Unforeseen consequences of the research on the Manhattan Project, however, included radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer, as well as the nanotechnology which would, by the close of the twentieth century, transform the world–not only with laser surgery but with digital cameras, and advances in computer science which seemed like magic.1

  Some of this technological revolution took years to develop, but others–of which antibiotics were the most conspicuous–began to change life from the 1950s onwards. Changes which can be seen with hindsight to be wholly beneficial do not always feel pleasant to the conservatively minded.

  While Iris Murdoch wrote her bestsellers about emotional chaotics, and Francis Bacon painted his tormented canvases of deliberately skewed popes and unclothed females, these artworks gave out messages of violence and unrest. These were confusing times. ‘Winter kept us warm.’ Demobbed soldiers found it hard to adjust to civvie street. Likewise, many British people felt beleaguered, even wondering whether the victories of 1945 had been anything but illusory.

  ‘Remember Magna Carta. Did she die in vain?’ The words might have been the motto of these unhappy or bewildered Britons, who saw something of themselves in the man who uttered them–Tony Hancock (1924–68).

  With his Homburg hat, melancholic folds of flesh about his jowls and his doggy eyes, Hancock was a comic who reflected an image of Britain, more especially of England, to itself. Hancock, with his series of humiliations and whinges, was an only half-exaggerated version of what many Englishmen now felt about themselves and about their country. Hancock had come down in the world. In the very act of being born, he had managed to run to seed. His parents, Jack and Lily, had run a hotel in Bournemouth. Jack died when Hancock was eleven. A spell at the Berkshire public school Bradfield College, also alma mater to the author of Watership Down, Richard Adams, added a glimpse of another world which fed Hancock’s archetypically English class chippiness. The war intervened when he was seventeen. His career in the RAF led him to Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) tours, and to acts in the Ralph Reader Gang Shows.

  His first peace-time job was at the Windmill Theatre in Soho, whose boast was ‘we never closed’. Comedy turns punctuated the naked displays. This work led to contacts with radio producers and sketches on such standbys as Workers’ Playtime and Variety Bandbox. What marked Hancock out was his petula
nce. His ‘character’ began to emerge in the series Educating Archie, as the tutor to a ventriloquial doll, operated by Peter Brough, called Archie Andrews. ‘Flippin’ Kids’ was his catchphrase. It was in the autumn of 1954 that Hancock’s Half Hour was given its first radio broadcast, scripted by that inspired pair Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The show transferred to television in 1956 and was soon being watched by 23 percent of the adult population.2

  Galton and Simpson may be said to have invented the low-lit dramas of English ennui which John Osborne and Harold Pinter, a few years later, were to make highbrow. Pinter trod comparable territory to that explored first in Hancock’s Half Hour and in the later incomparable Galton and Simpson series about the aspirations of a young rag and bone merchant living with his manipulative old father, Steptoe and Son. Galton and Simpson made Anthony Aloysius Hancock (the actor’s real names were Anthony John) live at 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam. ‘Hancock’, his biographer tells us, ‘was secretly in awe of Galton and Simpson’s acute sense of what was risible about his pretensions’ (his winemanship, for example), his hunger for education (encyclopaedias and potted histories of the world formed the basis of his reading) and his not always simulated grandeur of manner.

  In the tragi-comic half-hour plays, Hancock was always on his offended dignity, unlike his coarse housemate Sid James, who in real life was cuckolding Hancock. Sid bore an incongruous resemblance to Benjamin Britten, whose operas, the greatest works of music of our times–Billy Budd, 1951, Gloriana, 1953, The Turn of the Screw, 1954–were contemporaneous with Hancock’s Half Hour.

  Whether he was being a radio ham or a blood donor, or simply musing in 23 Railway Cuttings on the sadness of what might have been, Hancock was programmed, like his country, to failure and self-pity. One of his most touching failures–and it is only just a failure–was the feature film he made–The Punch and Judy Man (1962). In the film, his wife’s desire to better herself, and the scorn they meet at the hands of the snooty middle-class elders of a seaside town, turns to farce. It is a self-parodying lament for a Britain which was doomed. Now, when we look at Hancock’s eternally middle-aged face, even at photographs taken in the early 1950s when he was still young in years, we can see the self-destructive rage which in the summer of 1968 would lead to the overdose of barbiturates washed down with vodka in a Sydney flat. We can feel no surprise that so many of Hancock’s contemporaries wanted not merely to change but to obliterate the sad old place which provided the backdrop for such hemmed-in existences.

  ‘Go not after other gods’ was not advice which many Britons could be expected to heed when allured by the temptations of Elizabeth David’s gastronomic rhapsodies, or the sexual allure of Brigitte Bardot or Marilyn Monroe.

  When Elizabeth David (1913–92) began to write her cookery articles for Harper’s Bazaar, they must have read to many readers like fantasy. (When Ivy Compton-Burnett, a comfortably well-heeled maiden lady sharing her life with the upper-middle-class furniture historian Margaret Jourdain, was given a bottle of champagne at this period, she asked plaintively, ‘D’you heat it?’3) Elizabeth David wrote of aubergines at a time when such a vegetable was not to be seen outside the more exotic street markets of Soho and the Food Hall of Selfridges where, when in London, she went shopping. She wrote of olive oil when most Britons still bought this commodity in tiny bottles from the chemist. It was for massaging babies and loosening ear wax, not for preparing salad.

  Yet for all her sophistication, Elizabeth David was a woman of her time. She recommended the use of Knorr stock cubes, and she never saw the point of coffee: having developed a taste for Nescafé during the war, she ‘never wished for anything better’.4 But she was a revolutionary. She did more good for the British table and the British palate than anyone of the twentieth century. But, rather like her contemporary Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria novels enjoyed such a vogue in the fifties before being everlastingly forgotten, they looked always to abroad for their pleasure. Britain, as it discovered some time in the 1980s, partly thanks to the Prince of Wales, had a rich gastronomic tradition which had only been interrupted by the war. A Stilton cheese, or a good Cheddar, rivals any cheese in France. English strawberries or English peaches are as succulent and delicious as anything eaten in Greece to the sound of cicadas. But Elizabeth David showed no consciousness of the fact.

  A Book of Mediterranean Food (published in 1950) had been much more than a collection of recipes. It was a manifesto, which on its opening page quoted Michel Boulestin’s challenging view that ‘It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.’ In a Britain where food was still rationed (tea until 1952), and which in many quarters had all but forgotten how to cook, she evoked the smell and taste of another world–‘the oil, the saffron, the garlic, the pungent local wines; the aromatic perfume of rosemary, wild marjoram and basil…the brilliance of the market stalls piled high with pimentos, aubergines, tomatoes, olives, melons, figs…the great heaps of shiny fish, silver, vermilion, or tiger-striped, and those long needle fish whose bones mysteriously turn green when they are cooked’.

  Her Italian Food was chosen by Evelyn Waugh as a favourite book of the year in the Sunday Times of 1954.5 It was one of those books, together with her French Country Cooking and French Provincial Cooking, which were not merely collections of recipes, but sustained essays upon the delights of food, and evocations of the beautiful, colourful places where the recipes were born. Many copies of these books remained beside the beds of those, such as Evelyn Waugh, who admired their prose and the scents and tastes it evoked. Far more copies, however, were to be found in kitchens. Little by little, their pages would be stained with spatterings of tomato, oil and stock. Even by 1955, she could address the problem of availability in a reissue of A Book of Mediterranean Food in Penguin: ‘So startlingly different is the food situation now as compared with only two years ago that I think there is scarcely a single ingredient, however exotic, mentioned in this book which cannot be obtained somewhere in this country’6… Philip Larkin, uncrowned laureate of provincial England, once remarked7 that he knew the end of England had come when croissants reached Beverley in Yorkshire, though his friend Barbara Pym, whose sad, pinched little novels for and about church spinsters of both sexes he championed and enjoyed, liked to read Elizabeth David in bed. (Her books evoked the duller pleasures of preparing macaroni cheese and baked beans on toast.)

  Elizabeth David herself came across in her books more as a voice, and a strongly held point of view, than a character–though we now know, from her biographers, the strengths and vulnerabilities of her personality. She never exploited the emergent medium of television to show off her skills, either as food historian or kitchen performer. Fanny Cradock showed no such diffidence. She took understandable pride in the fact that in 1956, before an audience of 6,500 Daily Telegraph readers in the Royal Albert Hall, the Queen Mother said that she thought the post-war improvement in the standard of British cuisine was the responsibility of Fanny Cradock and her husband, Johnny.8

  Cradock, who was guyed on the wireless comedy shows Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne as Fanny Haddock, was one of those characteristic figures of our age who defied parody and whose own self-projection was far more ridiculous than anything satirists could devise. Her surgically lifted face gave her an expression of everlastingly indignant, frozen amazement, and she had been prepared to undergo plastic surgery on her nose when technicians told her it was ‘too big’ and was ‘casting shadows over the food’. Although she expressed the aim (for which the Queen Mother was to applaud her) ‘to make good cookery easy and fun for the post-war generation of housewives, who had grown up during the years of food shortages’, there was never much sense–as there was in the televised cookery lessons of the bearded Philip Harben, for example–that viewers were expected actually to try the elaborate recipes, and table settings, upon which Mrs Cradock insisted. The pleasures of her programme, like those of Nigella Lawso
n in a later era, were voyeuristic rather than gastronomic. Fanny dressed for dinner before cooking it, and hovering at her side was Johnny Cradock, her third husband, a put-upon Old Harrovian who poured, and sometimes commented upon, the wine. Rather as in the case of Gilbert Harding, another television ‘personality’ of the same era, part of Cradock’s appeal was her irascibility. ‘I have always been extremely rude, and I have always got exactly what I wanted.’

  The Cradocks, their accents and their clothes, were really a species of vaudeville as much as they were apostles of good food. Like their admirer Queen Elizabeth, they appeared to belong to the pre-war world of deference and camp fantasy which the Second World War and the Attlee government had effectively made obsolete. Like those who read Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited–and even more, those who watched it televised in 1981–the great majority of fans did not aspire to belong to the grandeur enacted.