In answer to the question ‘In what part of Middlesbrough and its neighbourhood would you prefer to live – why?’, the most popular reason for choosing a particular district was ‘healthier, better air, better for children’, followed by ‘like country, open’, ‘like the district’ and ‘better housing’, with ‘near relatives and friends’ trailing badly behind. Asked if they wanted to move to a new house, in practice almost certainly in a suburb, more than two-thirds answered in the affirmative – with the desire for better amenities (including a garden) as the principal motive but with what Chapman called ‘dissatisfaction caused by the social quality of the neighbourhood’ also playing a part. He got closer to that factor by asking the pertinent question ‘If you were entirely free to choose, would you want to live amongst the same kind of people that are in your neighbourhood now, or would you prefer to live amongst a different group of people?’ In reply, 55 per cent said they did want to go on living among the same kind of people; 28 per cent would prefer to live among different people; and 17 per cent were ‘unable or unwilling to express an opinion’. By far the most common reason given by the satisfied was ‘like them, they are all right, etc’, while among the dissatisfied a pervasive complaint was that ‘people are noisy, rough, etc’, though ‘don’t have much to do with neighbours – don’t like people round here’ was also popular.
Chapman further found that ‘neighbourly relations are of considerable extent and play an important part in many fields of the daily life of the housewife’, though he added the crucial qualifying point that ‘the unit of neighbourly relations appears to be very small, a handful of families participating in each group’. Moreover, not only was it the case that ‘the common social institution has so far been an insignificant source of “best friends” and even the common school is of very minor importance’, but ‘visits to common social institutions between neighbours who are friends are likewise seen to affect only a small number of people’. There were, accordingly, no strong grounds for ‘centring a residential unit around a common social institution – a community centre or a school – from the point of view of creating social integration’. Put another way, ‘the evidence is fairly conclusive that the idea of a neighbourhood unit [à la latest American town planning] which should be a microcosm of the social structure of the whole community is incorrect’.36
All in all, Chapman’s report was sober, unsentimental stuff. It realistically portrayed people’s strong desire for improvement in their personal conditions, preferably as part of a suburban lifestyle; their almost equally strong wish to live among those whom they perceived to be their own kind of people (whatever that kind might be); and their strictly limited appetite for the communal.
Was ‘the Titmuss version’ a complete myth, then? No, not quite. An official survey in late 1942 into public attitudes to plans for reconstruction located what it called a ‘thinking minority’ that was actively in favour of more state intervention in order to implement policies (in areas such as employment, welfare, housing and education) that would seek to benefit all – even if such policies involved higher taxation. The size of this ‘thinking minority’ was reckoned at between 5 and 20 per cent. Beyond that point it is difficult to salvage the myth. Indeed, the probability is that the size of this minority (inevitably disproportionately middle-class in composition) was actually shrinking towards the end of the war. Penguin Specials, originally launched in 1937, probably hit their peak in February 1942 with the publication of Archbishop William Temple’s Christianity and the Social Order, which sought to marry faith with socialism and rapidly sold 140,000 copies. But by 1945 sales of the Specials had slumped to such an extent that the series was temporarily abandoned.
Fundamental social and cultural continuities remained – indeed, were arguably strengthened rather than lessened by the war. ‘Class feeling and class resentment are very strong,’ Harold Nicolson observed with foreboding soon after the European conflict ended. The Cutteslowe walls – built across and even along a north Oxford road in 1934 in order to separate private from council housing – stayed obstinately in place. The most-watched films during the war were Gainsborough melodramas, virtually without political or even social content, while the plots of the ever-popular Mills and Boon novels coursed along almost regardless of what was going on in the outside world. A culture that was still holding its own was that of the improving, intensely respectable, wanting-no-hand-outs working class. The gasfitter’s wife Margaret Blundell spoke eloquently for it in her 1941 letter to Picture Post: ‘What sort of men and women will the New World children turn out to be if they are to have no struggle? One must strive if one is to develop character. Your picture of Rich v Poor does not ring quite true. A considerable number of working-class manage a holiday every year, all the more enjoyable when one has struggled for it. You would make things too easy. Jealousy is the canker of our time. The rich will always be with us in one form or another and rightly so.’ But within the working class the cultural future lay elsewhere – a future simultaneously epitomised and hastened by the startling rise in the Daily Mirror’s popularity (beginning in the mid-1930s but accelerating from 1943, with circulation rising from two million that year to three million by 1946). Drawing inspiration directly from America, it successfully relied on a threefold formula: a brash irreverence (not only in peacetime) towards the authorities; a Labour-supporting politics of a far more populist, less heavy-duty type than that ponderously upheld by the Trades Union Congress-backed Daily Herald; and a very professionally assembled tabloid blend of cartoons, comic strips (the legendary Jane), human interest, sport and (often Hollywood) celebrities. ‘Catering for short tea-breaks and even shorter attention spans’, in the regretful but probably accurate words of one historian, it was a formula whose time had come.37
A final survey. Patterns of Marriage by Eliot Slater (a psychologist) and Moya Woodside (a psychiatric social worker) was not published until 1951, but its richly suggestive fieldwork comprised a detailed survey conducted between 1943 and 1946 of 200 working-class soldiers and their wives, mainly from the London area. Slater and Woodside’s central focus was on courtship, marriage and sex – revealing in the last area an extensive amount of what the authors called ‘passive endurance’ on the part of the wives, typified by one’s remark: ‘He’s very good, he doesn’t bother me much.’ But there was much else. Both men and women, they found on the class front, ‘were dominated by the distinction that is expressed in “We” and “They”, and, even in this war in which all were involved together, by the feeling of a cleft between the “two nations”’. Typical assertions quoted were: ‘there’ll never be much improvement so long as the country is run by people with money’, ‘the working class should be given a fairer do than they have had’, and ‘MPs have no worries, they’ve all got money in the bank.’ The war itself had done little or nothing to broaden horizons. Nearly all the male conscripts, Slater and Woodside found, ‘were bored and “fed up”, took little interest in wider and impersonal issues, and were only concerned to get the war over and get home again’. As for their wives, ‘the war was a background to daily life, irritating, endless, without significance other than its effects on their personal lives.’ And for ‘men and women alike patriotism was a remote conception, not altogether without meaning, but associated with feelings which were entirely inarticulate’.
For the husbands in particular, Slater and Woodside emphasised, one concern dominated above all:
The spectre of unemployment is never very far away. Some have experienced it themselves; others remember its effect on their own childhood; and for still others it exists as a malignant bogy that must dog the steps of every working man. Again and again a preference is expressed for the ‘steady job’ as opposed to high wages, more especially by the older men. It is not likely that the lesson that England learned from the years of the trade depression will ever be forgotten . . . There was a strong feeling that the fate of the individual under the capitalist system had little to do
with merit, and depended on nebulous and unpredictable social forces. If only these could be controlled, a rich reward for personal ambitions was of secondary importance.
None of which guaranteed any more than a minimal interest in politics: ‘Politics, it was felt, had nothing to do with their ordinary lives, in which other interests, sport and home, predominated. Politics was a special subject, beyond the understanding of the uneducated, or too vast and impersonal for any individual effort to influence.’ A mere 21 out of the 200 men took ‘an active interest in politics’, but the attitude of the overwhelming majority was summed up by assertions like ‘I’m not interested in politics, it isn’t my job’, ‘politics are a pain in the neck, I’ve not the education to understand them’, and ‘me being an ordinary working-class man, politics is nothing to do with me; we’re too busy with our families and jobs’. Politicians themselves, moreover, were generally seen in a dim light – ‘all politicians are rogues’, ‘I’m against political parties, they’re only out for their own gain,’ ‘no government is any good’.
The wives, meanwhile, were not sufficiently engaged with politics even to be cynical, with ‘a serious and intelligent interest’ being taken by only seven out of 200. ‘The remainder showed an extreme apathy and lack of interest. Politics are felt to be remote from real everyday life, as incomprehensible as mathematics, the business of men. Preoccupation with personal concerns, the affairs of the home, children, leave little room.’ Slater and Woodside quoted some of them: ‘I married young, and had no time, with the children’, ‘I don’t read papers much about the Government’, ‘After being on your feet all day, you just want to sit down and have somebody bring you a nice cup of tea.’ With a note of palpable disappointment, the authors concluded about the wives that ‘their effect as a whole is negative, conservative, a brake on any change from the established order’.38
It hardly took a Nostradamus to see that the outriders for a New Jerusalem – a vision predicated on an active, informed, classless, progressively minded citizenship – were going to have their work cut out.
Britain in 1945. A land of orderly queues, hat-doffing men walking on the outside, seats given up to the elderly, no swearing in front of women and children, censored books, censored films, censored plays, infinite repression of desires. Divorce for most an unthinkable social disgrace, marriage too often a lifetime sentence. (‘I didn’t want it,’ my own grandmother would say to me in the 1970s when, making small talk soon after my grandfather’s death, I said that at least he had lived long enough for them to have their Golden Wedding party. ‘All I could think about was the misery.’) Even the happier marriages seldom companionable, with husbands and wives living in separate, self-contained spheres, the husband often not telling the wife how much he had earned. And despite women working in wartime jobs, few quarrelling with the assumption that the two sexes were fundamentally different from each other. Children in the street ticked off by strangers, children in the street kept an eye on by strangers, children at home rarely consulted, children stopping being children when they left school at 14 and got a job. A land of hierarchical social assumptions, of accent and dress as giveaways to class, of Irish jokes and casually derogatory references to Jews and niggers. Expectations low and limited but anyone in or on the fringes of the middle class hoping for ‘a job for life’ and comforted by the myth that the working class kept their coal in the bath. A pride in Britain, which had stood alone, a pride even in ‘Made in Britain’. A deep satisfaction with our own idiosyncratic, non-metric units of distance, weight, temperature, money: the bob, the tanner, the threepenny Joey. A sense of history, however nugatory the knowledge of that history. A land in which authority was respected? Or rather, accepted? Yes, perhaps the latter, co-existing with the necessary safety valve of copious everyday grumbling. A land of domestic hobbies and domestic pets. The story of Churchill in the Blitz driving through a London slum on a Friday evening – seeing a long queue outside a shop – stopping the car – sending his detective to find out what this shortage was – the answer: birdseed. Turning the cuffs, elbow patches on jackets, sheets sides to middle. A deeply conservative land.
3
Oh Wonderful People of Britain!
‘Seventeen days since V.E. Day, and never have I seen a nation change so quickly from a war mentality to a peace mentality,’ observed the diplomat-turned-writer Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart near the end of May 1945. ‘The war [ie that was continuing in the Far East and was expected to last well into 1946] has disappeared from the news . . . Sport and the election now fill the front pages.’ Sport included what was still the national game, and on 22 May the First ‘Victory’ Test ended at Lord’s with Australia pummelling an ageing England attack to win by six wickets. For Gladys Langford there was a rare treat that day, in the company of Mr Burchell, a fellow-resident at her hotel: ‘He took me first to the Saviours’ Arms at Westminster where we had a substantial lunch – then we tried to get into a cinema but there were queues everywhere. We finally went to the Polytechnic after which, queues being in evidence, everywhere, we had fish & chips in a Soho “dive” where coloured men [probably American servicemen] were much in evidence. To be taken out at 55 is quite a triumph.’ Anyone who had imagined that life would suddenly become easier in that first summer of peace was swiftly disabused. Judy Haines, however, took it all in her stride:
16 May. Mother and Dad H. came to tea. Abbé [her husband, whose real name was Alfred] made the jelly and blancmange. Mother played and I sang – for 2 hours. The husbands seemed very happy about it. Then we became engrossed in KANUGO [a card game], till nearly 11 o’clock. Very satisfactory evening.
19 May. As usual at holiday time [the Whit weekend], queues everywhere in Chingford . . . The bread queue was the longest I have ever seen, and think many were disappointed. We had just about sufficient, and I have always Ryvita to help out.
26 May. Cleared out tallboy. Listened to Pride & Prejudice. The ration this week, of chops, contained some suet. Good! Chopped it and wrapped it in flour for future suet pudding.
For Henry St John, working a few days later in Midsomer Norton, there was as ever only frustration – ‘I tried in vain to buy some Ovaltine, this being the 11th successive shop at which I failed to get it, although it continues to be widely advertised’ – but there was some compensation when, on the train back to Bristol, an American soldier gave him a Camel cigarette. The American influence, and indeed anything that smacked of the modern, did not play well with Ernest Loftus in Essex. ‘Mrs Williams [the French mistress] and I are taking joint action to stop our scholars attending Youth Clubs or, as I call them, Child Night Clubs,’ noted Barking Abbey School’s head in early June. ‘So far as our type of school is concerned they are a menace. The world is sex-mad & they are the outcome of the sex-urge + the war + the cinema + evil books + a debased art & music + an uneducated parentage.’1.
For one American, the writer Edmund Wilson, the experience of arriving in London later in June and putting up at the Green Park Hotel in Half Moon Street proved a salutary revelation of the Old World’s post-bellum bleakness:
I was given a little room with yellow walls rubbed by greasy heads above the bed – little daybed with horrible brown cover that seemed to be impregnated with dirt – wooden washstand with no towel – brown carpet with rhomboidal pattern, stained and full of dust – piles of dirt in plain sight in corners – small shit-colored coal grate with dismal gas logs in corner. The dining room, with slovenly wretched waitresses – stains of soup, eggs, and jam on the table that seemed never to have been wiped off.
None of this, though, pierced Wilson’s heart. But for Surrey’s scholar-naturalist Eric Parker, driving through ‘the Fold Country’ (between Blackdown and Godalming) on the last day of May to see what had happened to his county’s favourite corner since he had last been there in 1940, it was very different. ‘The Fold Country was an aerodrome,’ he found. ‘Oak woods had been uprooted, engines of steel had torn out by the roots cottages an
d fields of corn.’ Getting out of his car and wandering down a favourite lane, he suddenly found himself on a plain he had never seen before: ‘The woods had gone. The lane had come to an end. Instead, in front of me stretched a vast flat space, a mile-wide level with a mile-deep highway broadening out to where I stood . . . There in the mid-distance were the huge noses of steel machines lifting into the sky, monstrous waiting insects.’ Consolation came only when he reached Dunsfold and ‘its green with the old black-smith’s shop, and the Bricklayers’ Arms, and a cottage on the green covered with white roses, and another cottage with scarlet geraniums climbing to the windows – all as it used to be, years ago, in the Fold Country’.
Even in May 1945 there appeared two books that in time would fuel a nostalgia industry: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (early reviews dominated by perceptions of the novel’s snobbishness) and the Rev. W. Awdry’s The Three Railway Engines. The latter was published by Edmund Ward, a fine-art printer in Leicester who was, as Awdry later put it, ‘appalled at the lack of good quality literature for children available in the shops’. The irresistible size and format were almost certainly chosen with the aim of saving paper, and in ‘The Sad Story of Henry’ there featured the Fat Director (‘My doctor has forbidden me to pull’). The first performance of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, at Sadler’s Wells on 7 June, struck an altogether more pioneering note, as the National Opera Company returned home from a war spent touring. ‘After each curtain call,’ a member of the audience recalled, ‘people turned to one another excitedly while continuing to applaud; it was as if they wanted not simply to express their enthusiasm but to share it with their neighbours.’ Grimes himself, a rough-hewn fisherman, was a rounded, ultimately tragic figure, far removed from the usual dramatic depiction of the lower classes as little more than buffoons. ‘It looks as if the old spell on British opera may be broken at last!’ Britten wrote soon afterwards in response to an appreciative letter.2.
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