Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  It was a flexible, pragmatic reaction echoed by that of an underwriter at Lloyd’s in the City of London. ‘To my astonishment,’ the future journalist John Gale would recall about returning to England after the election, ‘I found that my father welcomed the Labour victory. “There might have been trouble if they hadn’t got in,” he said. I never asked how he voted.’ But arguably, in terms of prophecy, the palm went to an old trouper. ‘It may not be a bad idea for the Labour boys to hold the baby,’ Noël Coward, no friend to the people’s party, reflected. ‘I always felt that England would be bloody uncomfortable during the immediate post-war period, and it is now almost a certainty that it will be so.’18

  Why had it happened? Only two days after becoming Prime Minister, Attlee found himself at Potsdam being verbally strong-armed by Stalin, that electoral innocent, to account for Churchill’s inexplicable defeat. ‘One should distinguish between Mr Churchill the leader of the nation in the war and Mr Churchill the Conservative Party leader,’ he answered. ‘Many people looked upon the Conservatives as a reactionary party which would not carry out a policy answering to peace requirements.’ For Beaverbrook, as for many contemporary analysts of the election, the current leader was not to blame. ‘The unpopularity of the party,’ he wrote soon afterwards, ‘proved too strong for the greatness of Churchill and the affection in which he is held by the people.’ Fortunately there were some, including one young reform-minded Tory, Cub Alport, who were able in their post-mortems to transcend the Churchill question. ‘I think the election is a vote for the people who are least likely to involve us in foreign adventures, or bring us up against Russia,’ he told Rab Butler. ‘It is a vote for domestic security.’ For a few intellectuals, that sort of interpretation was altogether too tame. ‘It was not a vote about queues or housing,’ declared Cyril Connolly in the September issue of Horizon, ‘but a vote of censure on Munich and Spain and Abyssinia . . . The Election result is a blow struck against the religion of money.’ As usual, the views of his friend from prep school and Eton were more pertinent. ‘No one, I think, expects the next few years to be easy ones,’ Orwell wrote at about the same time, ‘but on the whole people did vote Labour because of the belief that a Left government means family allowances, higher old age pensions, houses with bathrooms, etc., rather than from any internationalist consideration. They look to a Labour government to make them more secure and, after a few years, more comfortable.’19

  Of course, there were plenty of other causal factors adduced then and subsequently.20The widespread belief that a Labour government would ensure a speedier demobilisation; the unusually even balance of political allegiance on the part of the press; the absence during the war of the familiar drip, drip of anti-Labour propaganda on the part of the fourth estate; the way in which that war had turned leading Labour politicians into familiar and trusted figures as senior ministers; the party’s high degree of unity; above all, the general feeling that the number one immediate issue of housing could best be met by Labour’s energetic message of can-do fairness: all these things contributed to the outcome. A significant minority of the usually Conservative-voting middle class switched to Labour and probably just as many abstained, often to decisive effect; for once, Disraeli’s ‘angels in marble’, the working-class Conservatives, failed their betters; and across the classes, the young voted Labour in large numbers.

  What about Churchill? In the eyes of a nation still hugely grateful for what he had done to help win the war, he was almost certainly still an electoral asset. But at the same time there can be no evading his prime culpability, as Tory leader from 1940, in the party’s failure to develop and start to propagate realistic policies in response to people’s understandable domestic concerns, above all in relation to housing and unemployment. ‘Before the Election,’ one Tory MP would recall, ‘the Post-War Problems Committee’s numerous reports, the “Signpost” booklets, the various pamphlets of the Tory Reform Committee, were all good, but they were not authoritative. They did not bear the imprimatur of the Prime Minister. There was no evidence that he had read them.’21Yet it is arguable that so powerful and pervasive was the mythology that had developed about the bleakness and inhumanity of the inter-war years – years dominated by Tory politicians and Tory policies – that no amount of domestic engagement by Churchill would have made much difference. Labour, after all, did not manage a decisive victory during those years, and indeed suffered three crushing defeats, culminating in 1935. Ten years and one arduous conflict later, a conflict which for an insular people had required an insular purpose, there was a strong desire not to return to the ‘bad old days’ – even though that desire paradoxically co-existed with a near-universal longing in other respects (above all the rhythms of everyday life) to get back to how it had been ‘before the war’.

  It would be both perverse and an error to exaggerate the revisionism. To take ‘1945’ out of 1945 leaves a barren historical landscape indeed. The electorate may well have been voting more negatively against the Tories than positively for Labour, there may well have been relatively little popular enthusiasm for ‘socialism’ as such (as opposed to immediate material improvements), Orwell may well have been right when he asserted soon after the results that ‘the mood of the country seems to me less revolutionary, less Utopian, even less hopeful, than it was in 1940 or 1942’ – yet at some level most people realised that a rather amazing thing had happened, in effect marking off ‘pre-1945’ politically from ‘post-1945’. ‘My man,’ called out a blazered, straw-hatted 14-year-old public schoolboy, John Rae, as he stood on Bishop’s Stortford station with his trunk that late July. ‘No,’ came the porter’s quiet but firm reply, ‘that sort of thing is all over now.’

  Even so, if there was such awareness, however inchoate or subterranean it may have been in many cases, it still had to fight for its place in the daily consciousness of the daily human round. Take a wonderfully revealing diary entry for Sunday, 29 July:

  Weather has been lovely – such a difference from this time last year when we ran so often to shelter. The streets look so bright at night now, with all the lamps lit. We went to Kilburn & it was so nice to sit & chat & not have to listen for the warning. The election result is still creating talk – I wonder where this Labour Government will lead us to. I heard that Ladies shoes are going to 9 coupons on the new books. I expect it is true. I still don’t believe Hitler is dead – & how much longer before the German war criminals are brought to trial. About time they were all shot else they will get off & start another war.22

  Rose Uttin – mid-40s, married, living in Wembley, husband Bill in charge of stationery at the Royal Exchange Assurance, daughter Dora a clerical assistant at Harrow Education Office, elderly mother living upstairs in the back bedroom – had, like virtually everyone else, much else on her mind besides electoral earthquakes.

  The pleasures of peace returned with a vengeance that weekend, as on the Saturday the trains of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway carried a record 102,889 holiday-makers to Blackpool’s stations. On Sunday the new ‘Light’ Programme superseded the wartime ‘Forces’ Programme, and though Anthony Heap’s immediate reaction was that ‘there is precious little difference in the type of fare provided’, there did take place on Monday afternoon the first episode of The Robinson Family, featuring ‘the day-to-day adventures of a London family and their friends’. It is unlikely that there were any listeners among those present that evening at the dinner party given by Hugh Dalton (the new Chancellor) in a private room at the St Ermin’s Hotel. The line-up was more or less the cream of Labour’s up-and-coming talent, including Christopher Mayhew, Woodrow Wyatt and John Freeman, as well as Durbin, Crossman and Hugh Gaitskell. Also present were Harold Wilson, an archetypal grammar-school product who had made his name as an academic high-flyer helping Beveridge and who was already viewed by Harold Nicolson as ‘brilliant’, and the only non-university man, George Brown. Predictably, Wilson ‘made me simply gape as he talked’ (Mayhew wrote home after
wards), while Brown (according to Gaitskell) ‘kept rather quiet’.23

  Two days later, the new House of Commons met for the first time to elect its Speaker. ‘When Churchill came in for the show he was greeted by the singing of “For he’s a jolly good fellow” by the Tories,’ recorded W. J. Brown (who had got back as an Independent). ‘The Labour masses retorted by singing “The Red Flag” – which I thought was very bad tactics, doing no good and calculated to frighten all the retired Colonels in Cheltenham and Leamington Spa.’ It was reputedly George Griffiths, a miner MP from South Yorkshire and member of the Salvation Army, who had started singing the socialist anthem; that evening Bob Boothby boasted at a London party that he was the sole Tory to have joined in. Strikingly, only 38 per cent of the Labour MPs came from a working-class background – compared with 72 per cent after the 1935 election.24Griffiths may have got them singing, but it was the lawyers, teachers, journalists, doctors, managers and technicians who would principally be calling the tune.

  Monday the 6th – the day after the Giles cartoon ‘Family’ first appeared in the Sunday Express, on their way to the seaside – was the August Bank Holiday. There were large crowds at most seaside resorts (as many as 35 relief trains leaving Liverpool Street station) and the usual cultural preferences expressed at the main attractions (31,440 people at London Zoo, 4,553 at the V&A). At Lord’s, where 10,000 were locked out ten minutes after the start of the Fourth Victory Test, play was interrupted at 1.00 by a terrific storm of hail and thunder – unluckily for listeners who, in an era before ball-by-ball, had been waiting patiently for Rex Alston’s description of ‘the closing overs before lunch’. Over at the White City stadium, some 100,000 tried, but only 52,000 managed, to watch a memorable athletics meeting. The stars were the two great Swedish middle-distance runners Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson, the latter taking on Britain’s pre-war record-holder Sydney Wooderson in the one mile and just winning. Wooderson, in the RASC, had reputedly travelled down from Glasgow by train and, not wanting to make a fuss about the fact that he was due to represent his country the next afternoon, had stood in the corridor all night. After the thunderstorm, the weather was cool and unsettled. ‘Obviously no day for Hampstead [ie Heath] or anywhere like that,’ noted Heap. ‘So after an afternoon stroll round Bloomsbury and an early tea hied us round to the Regent to see “National Velvet”.’ He enjoyed it on the whole but despite Elizabeth Taylor’s presence regretted that ‘the essential English atmosphere is missing’.25

  Meanwhile, some 25 per cent of the adult population had, as usual, been listening to the Home Service at 6. 00:

  Here is the News.

  President Truman has announced a tremendous achievement by Allied scientists. They have produced the atomic bomb. One has already been dropped on a Japanese army base. It alone contained as much explosive power as 2,000 of our great ten-tonners. The President has also foreshadowed the enormous peace-time value of this harnessing of atomic energy.

  Hiroshima (‘it’s been an army base for many years’) was identified as the target; but even on the nine o’clock bulletin, which included an official account of Britain’s role in the development of the bomb, there was still ‘no news yet of what devastation was caused – reconnaissance aircraft couldn’t see anything hours later because of the tremendous pall of smoke and dust that was still obscuring the city of once over 300,000 inhabitants’.

  The impact, nevertheless, was immediate. ‘My husband looked at me across the lounge of the London flat, and I looked at him,’ the writer Ursula Bloom remembered. ‘Horror filled us both, and to such a degree that for a moment neither of us could speak.’ Elizabeth Long-ford was sitting alone in her Oxford home when she turned on the wireless. ‘For the first time in my life I had a strong presentiment about the future: that a brilliant scientific discovery would bring a balance of evil to the human race.’ Later that evening, Joan Wyndham, standing around with WAAF colleagues at their Nottinghamshire air base waiting for transport to take them to the late watch, noticed Flight Sergeant Kelly hurrying towards them:

  First she walked a bit, then she broke into a run and walked again. It seemed odd because she wasn’t late for the transport.

  When she came up to us she said, ‘There’s a terrible bomb been dropped on Japan – the worst ever! It’s to do with re-directing the energy from the sun, or something. Everybody thinks the Japs will surrender any minute!’

  She probably expected a barrage of questions – or even cries of ‘Good show!’ – but there was nothing, only a shocked silence . . .

  I think I was stunned, not so much because of the bomb as at the thought of the war ending. Later, when the meaning finally sank in, I felt the strangest mixture of elation and terror.

  For the Rev. John Collins, Dean of Oriel College, Oxford, the news marked the moment when ‘I finally decided against the whole concept of the Just War.’ Within minutes of the bulletin ending, he was rung by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, who persuaded Collins to call at once his friend Sir Stafford Cripps, the ascetic, high-minded Christian who had just become President of the Board of Trade. Collins, as he later recalled, got through without difficulty, to be told by Cripps that ‘the Cabinet had not been informed about what was to happen’, though he ‘went on to assure me that no more atomic bombs would be used against the Japanese’. Still that same evening, Collins rang Lambeth Palace in the hope of speaking to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. However, he got only a chaplain, who told him ‘that His Grace had “gone into hiding” – a favourite posture of the Church in moments of moral crisis’.26

  Over the next week or so – which included, notwithstanding Cripps’s assurance, an atom bomb being dropped on Nagasaki – most people reacted in characteristic ways. Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, was reported by Evelyn Waugh as ‘greatly over-excited’; Joyce Grenfell declared herself ‘all for the Atomic Bomb, but not to drop it much’; Noël Coward reckoned that a bomb that was going to ‘blow us all to buggery’ was ‘not a bad idea’; and Vanessa Bell, writing to her daughter, spoke for the Bloomsbury Group: ‘What a to-do about the atomic bomb . . . I wish they’d get to the stage of labour-saving devices instead of destroying whole cities.’ J.R.R. Tolkien was even prompted to make a rare pronouncement, albeit private, on a public matter. ‘The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world,’ he wrote to his son. ‘Such explosives in man’s hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope “this will ensure peace”.’ He concluded, ‘Well we’re in God’s hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.’ The pattern-maker Colin Ferguson, writing his diary in Glasgow on the 8th, concurred: ‘The papers are still full of the Atomic bomb and what it may mean for the future. They hope it will have beneficial effects & not a diabolic outcome. I say, before they place any “hopes” on the future they’ll have to get men changed – not “political systems” . . . And in that they’re hoping against hope: there is no hope in man, and he is credulous who believes there is. The end is near – maybe some years only.’ As the news of the appalling human and material destruction filtered through, perhaps most people felt like that at some level, even if less starkly. Yet the observation of Gladys Langford was telling. ‘Everybody very proud of the Atomic bomb we’ve dropped on Japan,’ she noted on the 7th, ‘and yet those same people cursed the Germans for their cruelty when they bombed us.’27

  The day after Hiroshima found Henry St John, briefly on secondment in the north-east, working in Spennymoor: ‘I tried in vain to buy cigarettes. The public lavatory had some fixtures missing, and an unusual wealth of scribblings on the door of the water closet. “I know a little girl of 11 who can take a man’s prick. I broke her down in the woods, and did she enjoy it. I fuck my sister – she’s 14,” were specimens. A drawing showed a nude woman beside a bed, with a caption, “I’m
ready, dean”.’ Two days later, the urban anthropologist returned to the scene ‘to see if I could masturbate over the mural inscriptions’, but vexingly, ‘there was no lock on the door’. There was no such anticlimax for Nella Last and her husband on Saturday the 11th, when, having got ‘the extra petrol’, they set out from Barrow for the day, taking with them their next-door neighbours the Atkinsons:

  The thought that peace would soon be here, that mothers and wives could cease their constant worry, and anxiety, that people could begin to live their own lives again, seemed all mixed up with the warm sunshine and the fields of cut golden corn and the sea sparkling over the golden sands – a feeling of ‘rightness’. We walked round Morecambe, marvelling at the tons of good food – things in Marks & Spencer’s like brawn and sausage, thousands of sausage-rolls and pies, including big raised pork-pies.

  We went on to Heysham Head – surely the best shilling’s worth in the whole world! Lovely surroundings, a show in the Rose Gardens, a circus, concert party, marionette show, little menagerie, dance board with relayed music, seats for everyone, either in the sun or the shade – all included! . . . We sat on the slope of the Head to watch the circus, and I saw a group sitting near in very earnest conversation, with their heads together. I’d have loved to go and butt in. I love being in an argument, and thought, ‘Perhaps they are talking about the atomic bomb – or the result of the Election.’ I’ve very good hearing, and when I’d got used to the different sounds around, I could hear what they were discussing – the new ‘cold perm’! Every woman I know is interested in it – another revolution, when curly hair can be assured by a method so simple that it can be done at home.