Life was rather tougher for the men who had done most of the actual fighting. More than four million British servicemen were demobilised (too slowly, according to many) between June 1945 and January 1947, and probably for most the transition from war to peace was far from easy. Advice or support was not always available (partly because of the war in the Far East having ended so precipitately), previous jobs were often no longer open, the returnees were seldom treated as heroes by a deeply war-weary society, and the prosaic realities of peace frequently came to seem less attractive than the relative glamour (and male bonding) of war. ‘Thoughts and plans begin to turn inwards in an unhealthy manner,’ warned the British Legion Journal. ‘This can lead to all sorts of pitfalls, not the least of which is self-pity, and should be shunned like early-morning PT.’ The strains on marriages were severe. A couple might not have seen each other for several years; he expected to return to his familiar position as the undisputed head; she had become more independent (often working in a factory as well as running the home) – the possibilities for tension and strife, even when both were emotionally committed to each other, were endless. Inevitably, the number of divorces (in England and Wales) rose sharply: from 12,314 in 1944 (itself almost a doubling of the 1939 figure) to 60,190 by 1947.
Even if a marriage held together, as the great majority did, the experience for the children of a stranger’s return home could be deeply bewildering and even damaging. ‘I did not like this tall, weird, cold man,’ Wendy Reeves remembered about the return of her POW father: ‘After such a close relationship with my lovely warm, kindly grandad and uncle Colin, whom I worshipped, as they adored me. Of course, I did not understand at the time – but it became clearer as I became older – that Dad had become quite mentally unbalanced by his incarceration. He used to sleep in a separate room from Mum, was unkind to me – I received the first smack I had ever known, from him – and I became frightened of him.’ It was little better in the case of
Brenda Bajak’s father, a regimental sergeant major during the war:
He was a total stranger to me and I didn’t like him! He was moody and very demanding. He ordered us about as though he was still in the Army. He and my mother argued a lot and I wasn’t used to grown-ups arguing. He had no idea how to behave with daughters. He shouted a lot and insisted things were done immediately. He told us little of his war. His moods were dreadful – he was great when out at work or with other people, but dreadful at home. He never participated in a ‘family’ life. He just worked and slept. My mother did everything for him and was the ‘peacemaker’.4.
Many such discordant stories were played out in these immediate postwar years – the malign, destabilising legacy of a just conflict.
Was the woman’s place still, as it had been before the contingencies of war, in the home? A sharp if short-lived anxiety about Britain’s apparently declining population proved a key ‘pro-natalist’ weapon for the home-and-hearthists, even persuading two well-known progressives, Margaret Bondfield and Eva Hubback, to argue publicly in November 1945 that ‘domestic work in a modern home will be a career for educated women’. Coming from a different standpoint, the psychiatrist John Bowlby published in 1946 his first major work, Forty-four Juvenile Thieves, which found that the one common denominator in a group of adolescent London criminals was prolonged separation from their mothers. Also in 1946, the eminent paediatrician James Spence gave a well-publicised lecture entitled ‘The Purpose of the Family’ in which he emphasised the welfare of children, argued that the benign family unit had come under unprecedented pressure during the war, and insisted that only through preserving the art of motherhood could the family be saved.
Unsurprisingly, women’s magazines seldom deviated from upholding the domestic status quo ante. ‘If men and women fail to take their traditional positions in the dance of life,’ declared the Lady in January 1946, ‘only a greater dullness is achieved.’ Soon afterwards, a fictional heroine in My Weekly put it succinctly: ‘I’ve spent a week discovering I’d rather be Mrs Peter Grant, housewife, than Rosamund Fuller, dress designer.’ On the flickering screen, the message of Brief Encounter (set in the winter of 1938–9) was similar. ‘It all started on an ordinary day in the most ordinary place in the world – the refreshment room at Milford Junction,’ begins Laura’s voiceover. ‘I was having a cup of tea and reading a book that I got that morning from Boots. My train wasn’t due for 10 minutes. I looked up and saw a man come in from the platform. He had on an ordinary mac, his hat was turned down . . .’ But in the end she does not have an affair and returns to her dull husband: a vindication of restraint, domesticity and pre-war values.
By September 1946 the number of married women at work (including part-time) was, from a wartime peak of more than 7.2 million, down to 5.8 million – a total that no longer included Judy Haines in Ching-ford. Some seven months after gratefully leaving her London office job, she spent a peaceful but potentially disturbing evening with her husband on the first Sunday in March 1946:
Had Welsh Rarebit for tea. I must go to the Gas Company about the grill, the irons of which are missing, making it unusable. Welsh Rarebit isn’t the same untoasted. Abbé washed up and I dried; we each read some chapters of ‘The Outnumbered’ and then listened to our serial, ‘Jane Eyre’. I prepared our supper (cocoa and cakes) and put hot water bottles in bed while the news was on, to be in time for the speech by the Prime Minister, Mr Attlee. He was calling us all, especially women and the older people, to do a job of work [as] well. He added that he wasn’t asking anyone to overwork. Oh dear! I don’t want to go out working again. At the end of the speech Abbé said I had a job of work at home, and I was very happy. And I do do my own washing and make do and mend, which is all a help. I think Abbé deserves to be well looked after and a woman can’t do this and go to work as well. If she does get through both jobs she cannot be much of a companion.
The nation’s husbands agreed with Abbé. ‘Am just beginning to appreciate some of the advantages that help to off-set the financial loss entailed by M’s [ie his wife Marjorie’s] change over from office work to house-wifery,’ reflected Anthony Heap barely a fortnight later. These advantages included ‘being able to have all my meals at home instead of going up to Mother’s for breakfast and round to the British Restaurant for lunch’, as well as ‘no longer having to do any housework, such as washing, wiping-up, sweeping, dusting, firelighting etc, etc’. In short, ‘one certainly has a more comfortable time of it with a bustling wife around the house’. Or, as ‘a solid trade unionist leader’ in the north-east put it to the writer James Lansdale Hodson later in the year, ‘Men hate their girls going out to work and impairing their own dignity as head o’ the house.’5.
Three women had contrasting destinies. Alison Readman (born 1922), daughter of a colonel of the Scots Greys, read PPE at Oxford before proving so efficient as R. B. McCallum’s research assistant in his study of the 1945 general election that she finished up as co-author. Although their work was published in 1947 and immediately hailed as Britain’s first book of psephology, that same year she married a Whitehall civil servant and turned down an Oxford fellowship, believing that it would be incompatible with her future role of wife and mother. The first of five children was born in 1949, and in later years, in the words of her 2003 obituary, ‘she worked on a book that was to combine a study of moral philosophy and contemporary ethics, but prolonged bouts of ill-health meant that it never came to fruition’. Margery Hurst (born 1913) chose another route. In 1946, with a £50 loan, a small room in Brook Street and a battered portable typewriter, she founded Brook Street Bureau of Mayfair Ltd, which soon became the Brook Street Bureau – by the 1960s a chain across three continents that was almost synonymous with the supply of secretaries and ‘temps’. Marriage in 1948 and two daughters were successfully taken in her stride; a generally admiring obituarist in 1989, only a year after she stepped down as chairman of the plc, conceded that she could be ‘infuriating, domineering, self-willed and insensiti
ve to the effect that she had on others’; while as for her disinclination to stand up vocally for women’s rights, at a time when the business world was almost wholly dominated by men, she would simply say, ‘I can do more just by being me and letting it be seen what women can do.’ For Judy Fryd (born 1909), the personal was the political. She married in 1936 and had four children, the first of whom had serious learning difficulties. Fryd encountered such problems and prejudice that in 1946 she was instrumental in founding the Association of Parents of Backward Children, from 1950 called the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children, and now the Royal Society for Mentally Handicapped Children and Adults (MENCAP). ‘My career was always going to be in politics,’ she once remarked. ‘I just didn’t realise it was the mentally handicapped corner I would be fighting.’ An obituarist in 2000 reflected that ‘she taught us to help and learn from each other,’ adding that ‘Judy always reminded me of a cheeky little sparrow.’6.
Still, even sparrows need nests. ‘How I wish we’d a house to go to but still having my “main” piece of furniture will be “the best thing”,’ Muriel Bowmer, living with relatives in Sheffield, wrote to her soon-to-be-demobbed husband Fred in early October 1945. And a fortnight later, just before the great day, ‘according to tonight’s news they are going to “start at the bottom”, & build houses to rent first – so it looks to me as though that dream of ours regarding “buying” is going to do a fade out. Perhaps it’s as well we’ve got our name down at the Town Hall therefore.’ Barbara Pym would have sympathised. ‘Hilary [her sister] and I have taken a flat – in Pimlico, not a very good district, but perhaps we shall raise the tone,’ the as yet unpublished novelist told a friend in November. ‘It is on the corner of Warwick Square and really quite nice. Anyway we are so lucky to get anywhere at all, as it is practically impossible to get flats and you really can’t choose at all.’ Soon afterwards, Mollie Panter-Downes, another novelist but also the sender of a regular ‘Letter from London’ to the The New Yorker, noted that ‘the personal columns of The Times are full of pathetic house-hunting advertisements inserted by ex-service men – the new displaced persons, who fought for the homes they are now desperately seeking, mostly, alas, without success’.
In March 1946 the housing shortage was just as bad, even in parts of leafy suburbia, as one rehousing officer, George Beardmore, privately recorded:
Two wretched families have moved into one of our requisitioned mansions in Marsh Lane [in Stanmore, Middlesex] and are shortly to receive an injunction to leave. Have twice visited them officially and once unofficially, under pledge of secrecy, to give them some clothes and blankets Jean [his wife] has found for them. A scene of squalor and misery rare even in these days. A bus conductor, two women, and three schoolchildren, driven desperate for somewhere to live, camp out in a large dilapidated room without light, water and (yesterday at least) without fuel for a fire. Sullen and dirty faces swollen with colds, an orange-box scraped dry of all but coal-dust, two saucepans on an unmade bed, a spirit-stove on which bacon was frying, and a green teapot shaped like a racing-car on a strip of newspaper many times ringed.
At about the same time, Glasgow Corporation commissioned a film, to be shown in Glasgow cinemas and called Progress Report, No 1, about what its housing department was doing. ‘People everywhere are clamouring for houses,’ the commentary declared. ‘94,000 names comprise the waiting list in Glasgow alone. Of these 40,600 are the names of people who are actually houseless. To provide more and more new homes in the shortest possible time is the aim of the Municipal Representative at George Square.’7. Put another way, the numbers game was – for the best of reasons – now under way.
For a time, an important part of that game involved the construction of temporary homes using prefabricated materials – ‘prefabs’. Churchill in 1944 had promised a programme of half a million new such homes, but in the event only 156,623 of these temporary bungalows – each with a similar two-bedroom layout and mainly occupied by young couples – were built between 1945 and 1949. ‘You know we were offered the choice of a prefab?’ a youngish working-class woman was overheard remarking to her female friend at the Modern Homes Exhibition at Dorland Hall in London in March 1946. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have it. They’re nice inside but they look dreadful from the road. You don’t like to feel ashamed every time you get near your own home.’ The friend agreed: ‘Those prefabs are awful – when you see a lot together they look like pigsties or hen-houses, I always think.’
Architects and other commentators were similarly dismissive – ‘fungus-like outcroppings of those tin huts called “pre-fabs”’ was how one saw them – but all the evidence is that those who lived in them were highly appreciative of having a fitted bath, constant hot water and a built-in refrigerator. ‘I think everyone really felt they liked being in the prefabs,’ one 1946 investigator, Peter Hunot, found after talking to almost thirty of the families in Clarence Crescent, a London County Council (LCC) run estate of prefabs in Wandsworth. No one wanted to live in a flat, ‘many expressing a dislike of them’, while ‘hours and days had been spent on many of the gardens’, with each prefab (as with prefabs generally) having one. Perhaps inevitably, Hunot’s overall worry was that ‘this contentment seemed to be individualist’, though on hearing one man say that he had been among other people in the army for five years and was now glad to be on his own for a bit, the Hampstead-dwelling investigator ‘felt sympathetic and not so certain that the lack of community was a fatal deficiency’.8.
But of course, one word above all characterised life in immediate post-war Britain: austerity. Less than a fortnight after VJ Day, Panter-Downes outlined the grim implications of ‘the sudden termination by the United States of Lend-Lease’, the financial support that had got Britain through the war:
The factories, which people hoped would soon be changing over to the production of goods for the shabby, short-of-everything home consumers are instead to produce goods for export. The Government will have to face up to the job of convincing the country that controls and hardships are as necessarily a part of a bankrupt peace as they were of a desperate war. Every inch of useable English soil will still have to be made to grow food. People are suddenly realising that in the enormous economic blitz that has just begun, their problems may be as serious as the blitz they so recently scraped through.
Writing to her absent Fred at about the same time, Muriel Bowmer in Sheffield was already sounding a somewhat pessimistic note:
Everybody here aren’t very thrilled by the news of the latest rationing hit, & also by the prospects of still more tightened belts. We did think that once Japan was beaten we should do away with queues, but it doesn’t seem like it. Yesterday I queued 1/2 hour in Woolworths for some biscuits – & I was under cover. The fish problem seems to be a bit better here – it isn’t quite so rotten although the queues are there still. As for me, I’m O.K. for coupons, as it happens, & well stocked for clothes also – so I shan’t bother with much new this winter. I shall perhaps get a frock, &a new hat – I don’t know yet. However once the new fashions start coming in there will be a new style of things I think . . .
Over the next few months there began to grow a pervasive sense of disenchantment that the fruits of peace were proving so unbountiful. ‘No sooner did we awake from the six years nightmare of war and feel free to enjoy life once more, than the means to do so immediately became even scantier than they had been during the war,’ Anthony Heap reflected in his end-of-1945 review. ‘Housing, food, clothing, fuel, beer, tobacco – all the ordinary comforts of life that we’d taken for granted before the war and naturally expected to become more plentiful again when it ended, became instead more and more scarce and difficult to come by.’ He concluded, ‘I can remember few years I’ve been happier to see the end of.’9.
In terms of everyday shortages, the greatest concern – and source of potential flashpoints – was undoubtedly food. This was clear as early as October 1945, when an unofficial dock strike, last
ing several weeks, proved signally unpopular. ‘Dock Strike Threatens Rations’ warned the front-page headline of the strongly anti-Labour Daily Express (the most widely read daily paper) just as the Ministry of Food was about to announce that if the strike continued it might become impossible to distribute the full bacon ration. ‘Meat And Eggs May Be Off Next Week’ warned Beaverbrook’s crusader a few days later, by which time Mass-Observation was conducting a series of interviews in Chelsea (then rather more downmarket) and Battersea. Both men and women were predominantly critical of the dockers, but whereas men tended to look at the political aspect, including the damage being done to the Labour government, women concentrated firmly on the food situation:
The rations are bare enough as it is, without having to do without the bacon . . . They should be satisfied with the wages and appreciate the fact that they’re able to work without the Fly-bombs around.
It’s very selfish, I should say, making everybody suffer, instead of waiting a bit longer . . . It’s the food is going to be the worry; it’s disgusting when we’re so short of everything.
I think it’s very unfair – all the food going to waste. It’s not right at all.
Austerity Britain Page 13