Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  ‘We felt in a real holiday mood’ as, coatless, they drove home. And Last thought: ‘It will be a good month for getting in the crops, for the moon rose fair when it came in.’28

  Negotiations had dragged on for several days after the Japanese surrender on the 10th, but by Tuesday the 14th there was a general expectation that the end of the war could be only hours away. ‘Crowds of small boys keep going by with packing cases for burning,’ Gladys Langford tut-tutted that day. ‘I think it is a great pity in view of necessary economy in fuel this coming winter.’ The suspense mounted. ‘We listened eagerly to the six o’clock news – still nothing tangible,’ noted Last. ‘I thought of a remark I’d heard: “Perhaps Japan, too, has a mystery bomb and is playing for time.”’ Later, ‘when there was nothing on the nine o’clock news, I said that I was going to bed, as my back ached badly.’ But finally, as Ernest Loftus near Tilbury succinctly recorded, it came:

  At 11 p.m. – summary of news – we were told to stand by at 12 for an important announcement.

  At midnight, therefore, I switched on and Attlee the new Prime Minister announced PEACE. The Japs had accepted our terms. Even while Attlee was speaking the sirens began to sound on the ships in the river & some of them are still at it at 12.55 as I write this.

  The Merthyr Express described the memorable scenes and noises that ensued in South Wales – as in many parts of Britain – almost straight after the typically clipped announcement:

  The streets in all the towns and villages in the Merthyr Valley, the Rhymney Valley and the West Monmouthshire area were thronged with singing and cheering people. Dancing and singing took place from soon after midnight until the small hours.

  Those who did not hear the Premier’s broadcast were awakened by their neighbours, and many left their beds, donned dressing gowns or overcoats and joined the ever-increasing crowds.

  ‘The war is over’ was a cry frequently heard, and for many the news was almost unbelievable at first. Many women were in tears at the thought of again seeing a husband or son soon to be released from prisoner-of-war camps.

  Large buildings in many districts were floodlit – red, white and blue ‘V’ signs being very prominent. All our South Wales colliery hooters, train whistles, detonators, fireworks and rattles were used to swell the great chorus of celebration. Many bonfires were lit in the streets and on the mountain-sides, and shone out as symbols of Peace and Freedom.

  Nella Last in Barrow was woken from her half-sleep by shouting and the noise of ships’ sirens and church bells. For the next hour, as she looked through her bedroom window but could not quite bring herself to get dressed and go out, there were ‘cars rushing down Abbey Road into the town’, an excitable neighbour ‘half-screaming “God Save the King”’, from all directions ‘the sound of opening doors and people telling each other they had been in bed and asleep’, dogs ‘barking crazily’, ships’ hooters ‘turned on and forgotten’, and ‘the sound of fireworks coming out of little back gardens’. By 1.00 she had had enough. ‘I feel no wild whoopee, just a quiet thankfulness and a feeling of “flatness”,’ she scribbled before returning to bed. ‘I think I’ll take two aspirins and try and read myself to sleep.’29

  Attlee had announced in his broadcast that the next two days were to be public holidays, and as it happened Wednesday the 15th – VJ Day – had long been booked for the state opening of Parliament and the King’s Speech. ‘It was like old times even though there was no gold coach,’ reflected one of the Tory survivors, Sir Cuthbert Headlam. ‘The new Labour M.P.s are a strange looking lot – one regrets the departure of the sound old Trade Unionists and the advent of this rabble of youthful, ignorant young men.’ Not everyone, to judge by Judy Haines’s report, had been aware of the midnight revels:

  We got up as usual and were breakfasting and listening to the 7 o’clock news, when we realised a V.J. day was on. People had started out for work and hardly knew which way to turn when it was conveyed to them today and tomorrow are holidays. Some had evidently been given instructions to join the bread queue in the event of VJ, for that is what they did. I have never seen so many people in Chingford. The queues were more like those of a football match. The queue for bread from List’s stretched round to the Prince Albert. I was very glad Dyson’s opened as it is my shopping morning and I needed my rations.

  It was no better in Wembley. ‘Women grumbling & arguing in the queues,’ noted Rose Uttin, ‘& then it started to rain – everybody with heavy bags of shopping got soaked.’ Elsewhere, once the shopping was in and with the weather brightening up, there were the familiar street tea parties for children, followed by victory dances and bonfires in the evening. ‘All day long,’ observed Langford in less disapproving mode, ‘children have been passing with doors, window frames and other woodwork torn from buildings.’ Anthony Heap and his wife, on holiday in Somerset when they heard the news, decided to ‘dash up to London for the celebrations’, catching the 10.35 from Frome. For a time, as they made ‘a preliminary tour of the West End’, he half-regretted their decision: ‘Not quite so thrilling as we expected. The inevitable crowds gathered en masse in Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus & Buckingham Palace listening to tinned music emanating from loud speakers. But otherwise the rejoicing seemed to be rather subdued. Just thousands of weary-looking people wandering round the streets or sprawling on the grass in the parks.’ Sticking to their VE ritual, they went home for some tea before ‘embarking on the evening excursion’:

  Had to walk there and back this time, but as it turned out to be so much more lively and jubilant a jaunt than the afternoon one, we didn’t mind that so much. We waited among the multitude outside Buckingham Palace to hear the King’s Broadcast speech at 9.0 and see the Royal Family appear on the balcony afterwards. We stood among the crowds in Whitehall and saw Attlee, Morrison and Bevin on the balcony of the Ministry of Health building, though we couldn’t hear what the former was saying for his speech was continually drowned by shouts of ‘We want Churchill’ . . . We saw the floodlighting, we saw the fireworks, we saw the town literally and figuratively lit up – despite the deplorable dearth of drink – as it’s rarely been lit up before . . . So far as revelry by night was concerned, VE Day had nothing on VJ Day. It was London with the lid off!

  So no doubt it was, but for many people one day of celebrations was quite enough, even more than enough. ‘Another V.J. day spent quietly at home,’ wrote Haines on the 16th. ‘So glad of the rest.’30

  The election, the atom bomb, the end of the world war: all within a matter of weeks. It was a moment, inevitably, for taking stock. Frederic Osborn, starting on the 14th a long letter to the great American urban prophet Lewis Mumford, pondered the political upheaval:

  What has happened is a very big step in the British revolution – a shift of power to meet new conditions and new ideas. Britain will not willingly go far towards Communism; it will remain at heart a free-enterprise nation . . . It does not accept the state-monopoly solution, despite Laski and Aneurin Bevan; and sooner or later it will revolt against the facile solution of state ownership and be driven to expedients of entirely new kinds, which Labour philosophy at present scornfully scouts.

  Next day, amid the happy junketings, he turned to his obsession:

  I don’t think philanthropic housing people anywhere realise the irresistible strength of the impulse towards the family house and garden as prosperity increases; they think the suburban trend can be reversed by large-scale multi-storey buildings in the down-town districts, which is not merely a pernicious belief from the human point of view, but a delusion. Many of our ‘practical’ people, including our Mr Silkin [Lewis Silkin, the new Minister of Town and Country Planning], share the delusion . . . I am inclined to think the multi-storey technique will have to have its run . . . It is a pity we can’t go straight for the right policy. But it takes a long time for an idea, accepted theoretically, to soak through the whole of an administration; and the conflicting idea of good multi-storey development has en
ough enthusiasts to claim a trial in some cities on a fairly large scale. Damage will be done to society by the trial; but probably all I can do is hasten the date of disillusion. If I have underestimated the complacency of the urban masses, the damage may amount to a disaster.

  Few of any persuasion imagined that the end of the war meant the end of Britain’s problems. ‘We have a lot in front of us in reconstruction,’ Grantham’s Mayor-elect, Alderman Alfred Roberts, explained on VJ +1 to the local paper. ‘When you have won the war you have to heal the wounds of war, and that is our next job.’31

  PART TWO

  4

  We’re So Short of Everything

  The sporting highlight of the first autumn of peace was a far from peaceful British tour by the Russian football champions Moscow Dynamo. Amid much mutual suspicion and misunderstanding, four matches were played – draws against Chelsea and Glasgow Rangers, a narrow win over Arsenal and a 10–1 demolition of Cardiff City. The ill feeling that characterised at least two of the matches provoked George Orwell, writing just before Christmas in the left-wing magazine Tribune, to launch a full-frontal attack on professional football and its followers: ‘People want to see one side on top and the other humiliated, and they forget that victory gained through cheating or through the intervention of the crowd is meaningless.’ In short, ‘serious sport . . . is war minus the shooting’. This was too much for E. S. Fayers of Harrow, Middlesex. ‘George Orwell is always interesting,’ began his riposte. ‘But he does write some bilge.’ And after defending football as a game to play, he went on:

  As to the spectators, with the greatest possible diffidence, I suggest that George is in danger of falling into the error of intellectual contempt for the ‘mob’. These football crowds, if only he got among them, he would find are not great ignorant mobs of sadistic morons. They are a pretty good mixture of just ordinary men. A little puzzled, a little anxious, steady, sceptical, humorous, knowledgeable, having a little fun, hoping for a bit of excitement, and definitely getting quite a lot of enjoyment out of that glorious king of games – football.

  The good-natured rebuke finished unanswerably: ‘I’m sorry for George. He’s missed a lot of fun in life.’1.

  There was no resumption of the Football League proper until the 1946–7 season, but happily for ‘ordinary men’ the FA Cup did take place in 1945–6, on a two-leg basis. Less than glamorous Accrington Stanley found themselves pitted in the third round against Manchester United, with the first leg at Peel Park. Two down at half-time, Stanley then, ‘in as plucky a come-back as I have ever seen’ (in the words of the local reporter ‘Jason’), ‘drew level with two minutes to go to the accompaniment of an almost hysterical roar of triumph from the crowd’. Predictably, United won the return 5–1 – but ‘the game might have taken on a different aspect if two cruel pieces of ill-fortune had not come Stanley’s way.’ Three rounds later, at the Bolton Wanderers versus Stoke City match, there was disaster when 33 of the Burnden Park crowd were crushed to death. It could have been worse. ‘I think I had a pretty narrow escape and it was because of the kindness of the men,’ Audrey Nicholls recalled years later. ‘That was typical of the spirit of the times that they were concerned for me, a girl, and they just lifted me up and off I went down. They were marvellous.’ On 27 April 1946 the first post-war Cup Final, featuring Charlton Athletic versus Derby County, took place in front of almost 100,000 at Wembley’s Empire Stadium. As an occasion it had everything: an intensely emotional singing of ‘Abide with Me’; the appearance of King George VI in a grey overcoat (‘Blimey, he’s been demobbed too,’ shouted a spectator through the cheering); Bert Turner managing within a minute to score for both sides; a burst ball (reflecting the prevailing leather shortage); three goals for Derby in extra time as they ran out 4–1 winners; and, in the absence of champagne, ginger beer celebrations in the victorious dressing room.

  Almost everyone, it seemed, was hungry for escapism. ‘The biggest entertainments boom ever known is now in full swing,’ Anthony Heap noted in October 1945 against a background in the shops of an almost completely inadequate supply of goods for people’s disposable incomes. ‘Anything goes – good, bad or indifferent. Every theatre in the West End is packed out every night and to get reserved seats, one has to book weeks ahead.’ A patriotic hit that autumn was Merrie England, enjoyed by a thoroughly sensible, suburban, church-going young woman, Erica Ford:

  I put on scarlet & black jacket, black skirt, shoes & hat & bag. Went to N. Ealing Station & met Dumbo [an older man, called Harry Bywaters] 5.35. Went to Piccadilly & walked right up Shaftesbury Ave to Prince’s Theatre . . . Had two stalls. Very bright show & lovely music. Heddle Nash as Raleigh sang ‘The English Rose’ superbly . . .

  Went to Princes Restaurant 10.0 & had 4/6 dinner. Soup, plaice &chips & pears. Very nice. Bussed to Piccadilly & train to N. Ealing. Walked up Hanger Lane. Lovely night.

  Elsewhere during these immediate post-war months, the dance halls were heaving (cementing the star status of band leaders like Ted Heath and Joe Loss); the country’s 4,709 cinemas were almost invariably packed out (attracting in 1946 an all-time peak of 1,635 million admissions); and favourite programmes on the radio continued to draw huge listening figures, above all ITMA, the surreal yet warm Tommy Handley comedy vehicle which successfully relocated in peacetime to Tomtopia, a Utopia with Tommy as Governor. Colonel Chinstrap (‘I don’t mind if I do!’) was still going strong, while new characters included Nurse Riff-Rafferty, Big Chief Bigga Banga and his daughter Banjoleo, according to Tommy a ‘smashing portion of passion fruit, well worth a second helping’.

  Not everyone appreciated these radio days. Mary King, impeccably middle-class but servantless in her Birmingham suburb, grappled one Monday in April 1946 with a particularly big wash load: ‘Miss Newton, a young woman about 30 years of age living apart from her husband, had her wireless on in her bedroom with windows wide open (next door) from 9.30 to 2 p.m. All the jazz & what nots – a continual stream. It did not go in rhythm with my mangle, or aching arms . . . I heard her mother ask her to shut it off – and her answer made me feel I should like to throw several of my buckets of suds right over her wireless. What a day!!!!’ The disapproval, though, could go the other way. The middle-class cinema-going public may have lapped up Brief Encounter, but shortly before its official premiere in November 1945 its director, David Lean, had tried it out on a distinctly working-class audience in Rochester, where he was filming Great Expectations. The cinema, as Lean soon discovered, was full of sailors from the nearby Chatham dockyards. ‘At the first love scene one woman down in the front started to laugh. I’ll never forget it. And the second love scene it got worse. And then the audience caught on and waited for her to laugh and they all joined in and it ended in an absolute shambles. They were rolling in the aisles.’2.

  The high cultural mood, accurately reflecting the prevailing sense of fatigue even amid the pleasure-seeking, was one of isolation and retrenchment. A symptomatic episode was the enforced departure in October 1945 of William Glock as music critic of the Observer on account of his excessive enthusiasm for the difficult moderns, culminating in an obituary of Bartók which declared that ‘no great composer has ever cared how “pleasant” his music sounded’. Two months later an exhibition at the V&A of Picasso and Matisse achieved notoriety. An outraged visitor threatening the paintings with his umbrella had to be forcibly removed; the elderly daughter of William Holman Hunt clapped her hands for silence and announced that the pictures were rubbish; Evelyn Waugh informed The Times that Picasso had as little artistic merit as an American crooner; and a columnist on the art magazine Apollo not only confessed that ‘for me this stuff means precisely nothing’ but compared Picasso and Matisse as artistic leaders to ‘the more enterprising of the Gadarene Swine’.

  Relatively few would have demurred, least of all the upper class, uneasily finding its feet after the war and the trauma of the Labour landslide, and now also unwittingly finding its Boswell – albeit a Boswell
with a deeply imbued sense of what could be tastefully printed and what could not. On 7 November the Tatler introduced a new column, ‘Jennifer Writes Her Social Journal’. ‘Jennifer’ was the redoubtable Betty Kenward, recently divorced by her Hussars husband and left financially high and dry. In her first entry she gave a detailed account of the wedding at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, of Lord Kimberley to Miss Diana Legh, daughter of the Master of the Royal Household. ‘The King of the Hellenes was among those present, and Lady Patricia Ramsay was there, as tall and good-looking as ever. Lady Grenfell, who is the bride’s step-sister, was wearing a small cap of green cock’s feathers, and it was amusing to note how popular feathers have become, ostrich being first in the running . . .’ At times it was as if nothing had changed. ‘At the fashionable, carefree Carcano–Ednam wedding reception,’ the Tory MP, assiduous party-goer and cracking diarist Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon noted in early 1946, ‘I remarked to Emerald [Cunard] how quickly London had recovered from the war and how quickly normal life had been resumed. “After all,” I said, pointing to the crowded room, “this is what we have been fighting for.”’3.