Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  The ceremony was followed by the singing of ‘God Save the King’.

  There were similar scenes elsewhere. In the West Midlands, where streets in the working-class districts of Wolverhampton ‘vied with each other in the number of streamers and flags they could produce’, Hitler was ‘burned many times over’; in a Coventry suburb a self-appointed ‘Mayor and Wife’ – both men, with a builder, ‘the fattest man in the street, and the jolliest’, as the Mayoress – conducted a mock funeral for the effigy. ‘Preparations for these affairs were elaborate and careful and they were well-organised,’ the Mass-Observation survey found. ‘The whole performance seems to have been charged with a deep satisfaction for most of the people who watched it.’9.

  But for Gladys Langford – 55 years old, married in 1913, deserted by her husband in 1914, living on her own at the Woodstock Hotel, N5 – the escape from central London on a number 19 bus did not presage a happy evening:

  Miss Sweeney invited me to the bar [ie at the hotel] and I said I would go after the King’s Speech. When I arrived and saw a semi-circle of people all ‘put’ so to speak, I just fled. I remembered what Lil used to say at parties at home, ‘They don’t really want you – they are only being polite’, so I fled! Miss Sweeney & Miss Gilman both followed me but I refused their welcome and decided to go to bed early. However, Miss Stevens, Mrs Polley and Mrs Mobbs came about 11 pm to call me from the drive, inviting me to go to Highbury Fields where there was a concert – of sorts – and flood-lit dancing spaces. Crowds there with dogs and children much in evidence. Came back to find everyone almost in the bar and was persuaded to join the throng. Peter Gurney bought me a light ale and Mr Burchell a double gin. People were dancing on a space the size of a handkerchief, sentimentalising and singing – all in different keys and often different songs. Mafoot [?] insisted on kissing me and holding my hand – and I detest him. 18 year old Gurney took me on his knee and put his arm round my neck and Burchell wanted me to do ‘Boomps-a-daisy’ with him. My inhibitions made me refrain from doing more than laugh at less restrained people.

  Writing up her diary some hours later, she added with grim satisfaction, ‘there are some sore heads here this morning.’

  Henry St John was also on his own and living in a hotel, in his case the Westbourne in Bristol. In his mid-30s, he had been educated at Acton County School, and his parents had run a confectioner’s in Chiswick High Street. He had joined the Civil Service straight from school and seems by the mid-1940s to have had a fairly itinerant role, going to different regions and auditing the accounts at their labour exchanges. For him, rather as for Philip Larkin, the war had essentially been a personal inconvenience, and his diary entry for VE Day was entirely in character. It read in toto: ‘It was learned that the cook, who had been living at the Westbourne, went out yesterday and had not come back.’ Nor did St John’s next entry, recording the events of the Tuesday night, quite take the big view: ‘A party in a nearby house went on until 2 a.m., with music, dancing, singing, and shouting, so that I could not sleep until well past that hour, and as I slept badly the previous night I felt good for nothing today.’ St John seems to have been a man of virtually non-existent human sympathies but was not wholly exceptional in apparently having zero interest in this historic event. Another sleepless diarist was perhaps more typical. ‘Far into the night there was the noise of singing and shouting at the pub and fireworks going off, and in the sky the glimmer of some huge bonfire, or was it the illumination of London?’ The writer Denton Welch, living in Hadlow in Kent, then felt – as surely so many did – the discomfort of imminent change from a condition that, for all its inconveniences, had become familiar: ‘There were awful thoughts and anxieties in the air – the breaking of something – the splitting apart of an atmosphere that had surrounded us for six years.’10

  VE+1, the Wednesday, was inevitably a bit of a let-down, not helped by most pubs (in London anyway) having run out of beer. ‘This VE business is getting me down with fatigue’ was how Lees-Milne bluntly put it. A certain amount of normality returned – for example, the senior Labour politician Hugh Dalton took Michael Young from his party’s research department to lunch at the Marsham Restaurant and found him ‘not particularly sympathetic, but quite capable’ – but there were still plenty of festivities, including a plethora of street parties for children. These were mainly jolly affairs, as innumerable photographs show, though not without their tensions. ‘Half our road where all my friends lived had semi-detached houses and detached bungalows while at the bottom end the houses were small and terraced,’ Michael Burns later recalled about growing up in Tolworth just off the Kingston bypass. ‘We had a street party that our parents were insistent should not include the children from the terraced houses, so there were two parties in Southwood Drive divided by about two hundred yards.’ In Islington one of the children’s street parties was organised by a maid from the Woodstock Hotel. ‘She obtained a Nazi flag and took it into a pub and let people pay 6d a time to spit on it,’ Gladys Langford recorded. ‘She finally sold it for 10/-, having made a total of £2 15s 0d.’ Frank Lewis once again tried the centre of Manchester and once again was unimpressed: ‘Big crowds everywhere, especially Albert Square, still doing nothing, apparently just hanging about.’

  As for Anthony Heap, he more or less repeated his ‘programme’ of the day before, this time on his first leg getting a glimpse of the Royal Family as they set out for their tour of the East End. In the evening it was ‘once more unto the West End’, where he found ‘the same good humoured crowds, the same high spirited skylarking, the same awe inspiring floodlighting’, though it ‘wasn’t perhaps quite so overwhelming an occasion’. He finished with ‘a last enchanting eye-full of the floodlit splendour of St Paul’s Cathedral, Houses of Parliament etc from Waterloo Bridge’ before catching ‘what must have been the last 68 bus to Euston Rd which was completely illuminated from end to end with its full pale-blue peace-time lighting’. After seemingly interminable blackouts and no street lighting, this did indeed ‘seem the most amazing thing – this prodigality with light’, as Alan Bennett would express it when describing his VE memories (improbably enough of Guildford, to where his parents had moved briefly from Leeds). Heap concluded his diary entry without ambiguity: ‘And so we came to end of two perfect days. They couldn’t have furnished a happier set of memories to look back on in my old age.’11

  Kenneth Tynan might not have agreed. A precocious schoolboy in his last year at King Edward’s, Birmingham, Tynan had spent VE night watching his girl (Joy Matthews) go off with someone else, only not coming to blows because he realised that his rival was stronger. ‘But Wednesday night capped everything,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘I have never felt nearer to murder than I did then and do now.’ Ken and Joy were among a party – of fifty to a hundred strong – that spent most of the evening first at a ‘Jazz Jamboree’ at the Midland Institute and then at the Birmingham University Students’ Union, before heading towards Moseley:

  We walked along in a colossal line spread out across Bristol Rd – all except Joy and Bernard, who walked ecstatically in front, embracing each other every few yards. Then I got mad. I went completely berserk and walked bang into the headlights of a car approaching along Priory Rd. I was utterly, utterly despondent . . . I dashed off after Joy, croaking in a reedy hoarse treble that I was taking her home and that I would slit both their throats if they didn’t stop. Of course, they didn’t. They stopped, laughed at me (O Christ) and proceeded to neck in front of me in the middle of the road.

  It took eight of them to stop me from strangling the filthy bitch and that low bastard.

  A provincial wannabe being laughed at: a terrible moment, but he would soon enough be on the fast track to exact cosmic revenge.

  About the same time as Tynan’s humiliation, the Chelsea-based Mass-Observation investigator was returning home. She had spent the evening in the West End, mainly outside Buckingham Palace watching the crowds waiting for a balcony appearance and event
ually getting it at about 10 p.m.: ‘“Doesn’t the Queen look lovely?” says F35C. “The princesses were among the crowd last night, only nobody recognised them,” says somebody else.’ The gates were closed at both Piccadilly Circus and Green Park stations, so she walked home. Her report finished with a post-midnight vignette: ‘On a piece of waste ground in Flood Street ten or twelve children are silently gathered round a bonfire. They look tired but happy and absorbed. One says in a low voice, “It’ll last a long time yet.” A man at the end of the street is striking matches and says he is looking for a shilling he has dropped. Throws match away angrily, saying, “They don’t last long enough.”’12

  2

  Broad Vistas and All That

  Britain in 1945. No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves, no dishwashers, no Formica, no vinyl, no CDs, no computers, no mobiles, no duvets, no Pill, no trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks. Four Indian restaurants. Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red telephone boxes, Lyons Corner Houses, trams, trolley-buses, steam trains. Woodbines, Craven ‘A’, Senior Service, smoke, smog, Vapex inhalant. No launderettes, no automatic washing machines, wash day every Monday, clothes boiled in a tub, scrubbed on the draining board, rinsed in the sink, put through a mangle, hung out to dry. Central heating rare, coke boilers, water geysers, the coal fire, the hearth, the home, chilblains common. Abortion illegal, homosexual relationships illegal, suicide illegal, capital punishment legal. White faces everywhere. Back-to-backs, narrow cobbled streets, Victorian terraces, no high-rises. Arterial roads, suburban semis, the march of the pylon. Austin Sevens, Ford Eights, no seat belts, Triumph motorcycles with sidecars. A Bakelite wireless in the home, Housewives’ Choice or Workers’ Playtime or ITMA on the air, televisions almost unknown, no programmes to watch, the family eating together. Milk of Magnesia, Vick Vapour Rub, Friar’s Balsam, Fynnon Salts, Eno’s, Germolene. Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear, no ‘teenagers’. Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being. Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend.

  For the policy-makers, the planners, the intelligentsia, the readers of Penguin Specials, everyone with an occupational or emotional stake in ‘the condition of the people’, there was no shortage of problems to be tackled.1Some flowed directly from the war – three-quarters of a million houses destroyed or severely damaged, huge disruption to public services, Britain’s debt a record £3.5 billion – but others were of longer standing. Life expectancy had increased from some 50 years in the Edwardian era to about 65, and classic killer diseases like tuberculosis, scarlet fever and typhoid were almost under control; yet access to the medical services remained for many far from free or equitable, and considerable suffering resulted from an unwillingness or (more usually) financial inability to use them. Despite a reasonably energetic slum-clearance programme between the wars, there were still many appalling Victorian slums in the major cities and large pockets of overcrowded, inadequate-to-wretched housing almost everywhere. About seven million dwellings lacked a hot-water supply, some six million an inside WC, almost five million a fixed bath. Above all, there was the profound emotional as well as practical legacy of the economic slump between the wars – at its worst from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, causing widespread poverty and destroying or at best stunting millions of lives. The resonance of ‘Jarrow’, the ‘murdered’ north-east shipyard town that famously marched against unemployment, or indeed ‘the thirties’, would last for half a century. Even a Prince of Wales had once murmured that something had to be done; it had become a less than revolutionary sentiment to agree.

  Wartime developments had – at least in retrospect – a seemingly irresistible momentum. As early as January 1941, while the bombs were falling, Picture Post outlined in a celebrated special issue (complete with six naked, presumably impoverished small children on the cover) ‘A Plan For Britain’. The magazine recalled the sudden end of the war in November 1918: ‘The plan was not there. We got no new Britain . . . This time we can be better prepared. But we can only be better prepared if we think now.’ Accordingly, a series of articles (including ‘Work for All’, ‘Plan the Home’, ‘Social Security’, ‘A Plan for Education’, ‘Health for All’ and ‘The New Britain Must be Planned’) offered an initial blueprint for ‘a fairer, pleasanter, happier, more beautiful Britain than our own’.2.

  Over the next 18 months or so, the concept began to be accepted that the British people, in return for all their sufferings in a noble cause, deserved a new start after the war. December 1942 saw the publication of the Beveridge Report, drawn up by the eminent economist and civil servant Sir William Beveridge. In it he set out proposals for a comprehensive post-war system of social security, in effect laying the foundations for the ‘classic’ welfare state – an attack upon what he memorably depicted as ‘the five giant evils’ of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – and in so doing caused such a stir that an extraordinary 630,000 copies of the report (mainly the abridged, popular edition) were sold. Then, in 1944, as the war began to draw to a close, there were two major ‘reconstruction’ moments: in May the publication of a White Paper that committed the British government to the pursuit of full employment as the highest economic objective; and in August the arrival on the statute book of R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler’s Education Act, which, among other things, created free, non-fee-paying grammar schools.

  To all appearances the reforming, forward-looking tide was running fast. Who Else Is Rank was the symptomatic title of an unpublished novel co-written the following winter by a 22-year-old Kingsley Amis and a fellow Signals officer. ‘We must see to it after we’re demobilised,’ the Amis figure (a sensitive young lieutenant) says at one point, ‘that these common men, from whom we’re separated only by a traditional barrier – we’re no more than common men ourselves – benefit from the work that has been done, and if the system won’t let that happen, well, we shall just have to change the system.’3.

  In April 1945, as Hitler made his last stand in Berlin, the Labour Party issued its manifesto for the election that was bound to follow the end of the war. Called Let Us Face the Future, it demanded decisive action by the state to ensure full employment, the nationalisation of several key industries, an urgent housing programme, the creation of a new national health service and (in a nod to Beveridge) ‘social provision against rainy days’. The tone was admirably lacking in bombast but distinctly high-minded. ‘The problems and pressures of the post-war world,’ the fairly brief document declared, ‘threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years. The Labour Party’s programme is a practical expression of that spirit applied to the tasks of peace. It calls for hard work, energy and sound sense.’ The manifesto’s principal author was Michael Young, not long before his lunch with Hugh Dalton. Aged 29, he had been educated at the progressive Dartington Hall and been director of a newish organisation, Political and Economic Planning (PEP), before in February 1945 moving to the Labour Party’s research department. Young in later life was self-deprecating about the manifesto: ‘The mood was such that second-class documents were going to be thought first-class with a star.’4.

  Two crucial questions suggest themselves, however. How by 1945, at the apparent birth of a new world, did the ‘activators’ – politicians, planners, public intellectuals, opinion-formers – really see the future? And how did their vision of what lay ahead compare with that of ‘ordinary people’? The overlaps and mismatches between these two sets of expectations would be fundamental to the playing out of the next three or more decades.

&
nbsp; There would be no fly-pasts in its honour, but arguably 1940 was the British state’s finest hour, as the nation – under the iron-willed direction of Ernest Bevin as Minister of Labour in Churchill’s coalition government – mobilised for total war more quickly and effectively than either Germany or Russia. The state, in other words, proved that it could deliver, as it also did by introducing wide-scale rationing in a way generally seen as equitable. Simultaneously, the first half of the war saw the creation of a plethora of new ministries: not only Labour but Economic Warfare, Food, Home Security, Information, Shipping, Aircraft Production and Production. By 1943 there were, not surprisingly, well over a quarter of a million more civil servants than there had been before the war. It was soon clear, moreover, that all the work of these ministries, as well as of the traditional ones, was now predicated upon assumptions of co-ordinated central planning – an utterly different mindset from Whitehall’s customary approach and propagated by some exceptionally talented temporary recruits there, often operating at a very high level.