Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  The man responsible for these gratifying conflagrations was the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, still in his early 30s. It is clear that there was an element of opportunism on his part – like the Chancellor, Sir Stafford Cripps, all his deep-rooted administrative instincts lay in the direction of planning and controls rather than the market and the price mechanism – but he was well aware of the favourable personal publicity that his ‘bonfires’ would attract. He could also talk a good game. ‘A Housewife Argues with Harold Wilson’ was an encounter set up by Picture Post at the start of 1949, as Mrs Lilian Chandler of Bexley Heath, Kent, complained on behalf of women generally about shortages, high prices and the lack of quality in essential goods such as shoes, clothes, sheets, towels, saucepans and furniture. ‘I’d like to point out that I’m a father myself’ was how Wilson began his able, detailed defence. ‘I’ve got two small boys – one five years old and the other only seven months – and I assure you that my wife wouldn’t let me go for long without learning about the difficulties the mother and housewife has today.’ In March, not long before he was photographed tearing up a clothes-ration book, he sat next to the Liberal grandee Violet Bonham Carter at a dinner at the American Embassy, with the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, on her other side. ‘I started off with Harold Wilson, who didn’t attract me at all,’ she noted. ‘He is short, fat, podgy & rather pushing & seemed anxious to be “in” on every conversation that was going – & to tell his own stories instead of listening to Bevin’s when Bevin turned to me.’ By contrast, she found Bevin ‘absolutely natural, solid, 3-dimensional’.

  It was still a drab, drab world. ‘Dreariness is everywhere,’ lamented Gladys Langford, a schoolteacher in north London, on a Sunday towards the end of 1948. ‘Streets are deserted, lighting is dim, people’s clothes are shabby and their tables bare.’ The drabness pervaded small things as well as big – ‘We miss very much the coloured and decorated crockery we used to get before the war,’ Mrs Chandler told Wilson – but it was rumbling stomachs and unsatisfied tastebuds that really lowered spirits. ‘Oh, for a little extra butter!’ wailed Vere Hodgson, a welfare worker in west London, in March 1949, just after it had been announced that the meat ration was to go down again. ‘Then I should not mind the meat. I want half a pound of butter a week for myself alone . . . For ten years we have been on this miserable butter ration, and I am fed up. I NEVER enjoy my lunch . . .’ The immediate result of the further cut in the ordinary meat ration was lengthening queues at horse-meat shops, while soon afterwards disgruntled butchers were reported as saying that they needed not scales but a tape measure to do their job.

  At least the lights in shop windows and electric signs were by now going on, while also in April there was another bright moment when sweets at last came off the ration after seven long years. ‘It’s wonderful to see all children munching sweets,’ declared mother-of-two Judy Haines in Chingford, but in the event the demand proved so great that in August they returned to the ration. Accompanying the deep, widespread, natural desire to get back to pre-war abundance (relatively speaking) was an instinctive reluctance to try newfangled ways of countering the shortages. That summer, one of the Ministry of Food’s regular consumer surveys discovered that more than 73 per cent of households were finding the present ration of soap insufficient – and that well over two-thirds of working-class households were unwilling to experiment with soapless detergents. ‘Ten years ago the war started,’ Rose Uttin, a Wembley housewife, noted bluntly on 3 September 1949, ‘& we are still on the rations.’2. With every peacetime day that passed, the ‘fair shares’ rationale seemed that much less compelling.

  Inevitably, the black market remained in robust existence, if not quite so ubiquitous as in the immediate post-war years. In January 1949 a much-publicised judicial inquiry (the Lynskey Tribunal) found that John Belcher, a junior minister, and George Gibson, a former chairman of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) who was now chairman of the North-Western Electricity Board, had granted favours in return for what Panter-Downes summarised as ‘the pathetically minor rewards of a few good dinners, a few bottles of Scotch, and a few free suits of clothes’ – their road to ruin in what she called ‘a fantastic fairy story of human frailty lost in a jungle of spivs’. The spiv himself remained a far from universally loved figure, not least the super-spiv of this particular scandal, a high-living, smooth-talking Polish immigrant calling himself Sydney Stanley who was condemned by the judge for his ‘reckless disregard of the truth’. ‘He looks the SPIV type,’ Gladys Langford in her Highbury hotel sniffed at the end of 1948 about the new occupant of the next-door room, ‘small, dark, sallow in silver grey rather shoddy suit – like a recent bridegroom’. And when in September 1949 Joyce Grenfell’s husband was assaulted by a young man in Piccadilly in a dispute about a taxi, her lengthy account to a friend referred to him throughout as ‘the spiv’, though in fact he was a bookmaker’s assistant. ‘The bland smoothness of the little man was maddening,’ she added in justification of her husband pressing charges after ‘the spiv denied the whole thing with the innocence of a new born baby’.

  Nevertheless, as had already started to become apparent during 1948, attitudes to the black market were softening significantly as the passive acceptance of the patriotic-cum-socialist necessity of rationing and shortages steadily dwindled. The emblematic figure was Arthur English, a house painter from Aldershot who made his debut at the Windmill Theatre in March 1949 and by the end of the year was a radio star on Variety Bandbox. Wearing a white suit with huge shoulder pads (‘I ’ad to come in the swing-door sideways!’) and a flowery kipper tie down to his knees (‘Keeps me knees warm in winter!’), he would invariably start his routine with a conspiratorial opening line, ‘’Ere, Tosh’, before launching into a mixture of catchphrases (‘Sharpen up there – the quick stuff’s coming’) and high-speed patter. Almost instantly he became the archetypal – and loveable – cockney spiv, ‘The Prince of the Wide Boys’. The verse with which he rounded off his first broadcast unerringly presaged the end of austerity as a source of social unity:

  Shove on the coal, blow the expense,

  Just keep the ’ome fires burning.

  Perhaps I’ve made you larf a lot,

  I ’ope I’ve brought yer joy,

  So ’ere’s mud in yer eye from the end of me tie,

  Good night – and Watch the boy!3.

  ‘Fancy coming home from the Motor Show and kicking our poor old car,’ said the wife to her husband in a Giles cartoon in October 1948, as he clutched his foot in agony. The frustration was understandable. At what the Daily Express called ‘the biggest “Please-do-not-touch” exhibition of all time’, 32 British car manufacturers were showing more than 50 models at a time when, because most of the motor industry’s production was compulsorily reserved for export, the delivery dates for the home market ranged from 12 months to two and a half years. Such was the hunger for almost anything on four wheels that that painful circumstance did not stop huge crowds coming to the first post-war Motor Show at Earls Court, over the ten days a total of 562,954, almost double the previous record.

  The Vauxhall Velox and the Jowett Javelin both drew many admirers, but without doubt the star attraction was Alec Issigonis’s Morris Minor, an attempt to create a British counterpart to the Volkswagen Beetle. Having been dismissed at the drawing-board stage as ‘a poached egg’ by Lord Nuffield, founder-owner of Morris Motors, it was in fact a brilliant design: no chassis but an all-in-one body shell; independent front suspension; and rank-and-pinion steering that made the car easy to drive. ‘Women loved the Morris Minor,’ recalled one car salesman, John Macartney. ‘It was very light, it was very responsive – there was a saying that if you drove over a penny in a Morris Minor you knew whether you’d gone over heads’ or tails’ side up.’ Not every alpha male approved of women drivers, but for Barbara Hardy, a married woman who acquired her Morris Minor in the 1950s, it was as if the distinctive, jelly-mould shape became an emblem of emancipa
tion. ‘I could fit five in the back and put two on the seat beside me,’ she remembered about her time as leader of a cub pack. ‘There were no seat belts in those days, and there weren’t the cars on the road. I did my own thing in those days.’4.

  The appetite for motor cars was matched by that for news and gossip about the Royal Family. ‘It looks as if Princess Margaret will one day be Duchess of Malborough,’ reckoned Vere Hodgson in December 1948. The so-called ‘Margaret Set’ was at this point aristocratic rather than bohemian in composition – with ‘Sunny’ Blandford himself and the Earl of Dalkeith (Johnny Dalkeith) as the two leading members, though there was also the very rich Billy Wallace. Margaret’s recent 18th birthday had been the cue for endless profiles, in the provincial as well as the national press. After calling her ‘a leader of youthful fashions’, typified by her beaver-trimmed coats, the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette went on: ‘This Princess who loves to rumba, to wear high heels and to use lipstick, brighter and thicker than her mother really approves, is still a child in many ways. She has great poise, but sometimes a youthful nervousness breaks through.’ The following spring, ‘Princess Margaret Leaves By ’Plane for Italy’ was a front-page story for the Coventry Evening Telegraph, with the obligatory reference by the reporter at London Airport to how she ‘waved from the window to the crowd as the ’plane rose into the air’. A world to conquer lay before her. ‘High-spirited to the verge of indiscretion,’ a mutual friend informed the diarist James Lees-Milne soon after Margaret’s return from her four-week holiday in Italy. ‘She mimics lord mayors welcoming her on platforms and crooners on the wireless, in fact anyone you care to mention . . . She has a good singing voice. In size she is a midget but perfectly made. She inadvertently attracts all the young eligibles to her feet, which doesn’t endear her to the girls.’

  Not everyone was quite as staunchly royalist as Lees-Milne, as he found one stormy afternoon in Hyde Park not long after Margaret’s birthday celebrations in August 1948:

  A violent cloudburst of rain descended so I sheltered in a temple alcove. In it were two working-class men talking disrespectfully of the Royal Family. Some women driven in by the rain joined in the conversation, and agreed that the Royal Family were an unnecessary expense. All spoke without vitriol and quite dispassionately. I was surprised, and merely said that I totally disagreed. Wished them good-day and ostentatiously walked off. Got soaked.

  There was no room for cynics among the patiently waiting crowd outside Buckingham Palace on the evening of Sunday, 14 November. ‘It’s a boy,’ a policeman eventually announced through cupped hands. ‘Both well.’ The word ‘boy’ quickly went round, and the crowd (mainly men) stayed on ‘to cheer, to sing and to call for the father, until asked to go home in the early hours’, while in Trafalgar Square the illuminated fountains were lit with blue lights, the pink ones being redundant. The next day saw more crowds milling round the Palace and shouting ‘Good old Philip’, the ringing of bells at Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, and the royal salute of 41 guns from Hyde Park and the Tower. But Anthony Heap was cross that the bells and guns had not been heard straight after the birth the previous evening. ‘Have the officials responsible for these things no sense of drama?’ he asked himself. It was not until the eve of the christening on 15 December that the public was let in on the name of the new Prince, but this time Heap gave a nod, approving of Charles for its ‘right royal ring’. A big crowd standing outside the Palace watched people arrive for the event. ‘It is,’ reflected Harold Nicolson (himself about to start work on the official life of George V), ‘the identification of natural human experience with this strange royal world that causes these emotions; one’s own life enlarged into a fairy story.’5.

  Another happy family were the Huggetts. After appearing in the 1947 comedy Holiday Camp, they got the first film of their own in Here Come the Huggetts, released in November 1948. ‘The lively, laughing, loveable Huggetts are Britain’s very own family,’ declared the poster, with Jack Warner as the father in this middle-class suburban family and Petula Clark as one of his daughters. The fairly feeble plot turned on the visit being paid by a flashy blonde cousin (Diana Dors as a 15-year-old jitterbug queen) and the mistaken belief that the father was having a fling with her. ‘It’s an unpretentious affair and none the worse for that,’ thought Picturegoer, which praised the ‘requisite touch of sentimentality’, but for Anthony Heap, who saw it at the King’s Cross cinema, it was at best ‘pleasant entertainment’, handicapped by a ‘persistently pedestrian’ script. Two more films followed in quick succession – Vote for Huggett (revolving round a promise to construct a war memorial) and The Huggetts Abroad (not their kind of place, with Mrs Huggett lamenting the absence of queues) – before the series came to a more or less unlamented end. In retrospect, the films’ main interest lies in the role of the father, Joe Huggett. Often he seems to be marginalised (‘Nobody does anything I ask them round here,’ he complains) as events and misunderstandings go on around him, but in the end it is he who sorts things out and has his position of authority validated and reinforced. But if the contrast with his affectionate but scatterbrained wife Kathleen and their three daughters was stark, it raised few eyebrows at the time.

  Here Come the Huggetts was never likely to get a Royal Command performance, unlike the epic, slow-moving, intensely patriotic Scott of the Antarctic, released at about the same time and starring John Mills as Captain Scott, with a suitably grandiloquent score by Vaughan Williams. ‘Such a film as Scott is welcome at a time when other races speak disparagingly of our “crumbling empire” and our “lack of spirit”’ was the unashamed response of the Sunday Dispatch. ‘It should make those who have listened too closely to such talk believe afresh that ours is the finest breed of men on this earth. And so it is.’ Above all, there was the film’s emotional continence, the very quintessence of still-prized stiff-upper-lippedness. ‘What iron discipline and self-control!’ reflected Vere Hodgson after seeing it. ‘They joked to the last, and never said one word to each other of what they really thought . . . I am sure no men but those of English race could have kept up that courtesy and nonchalance to the last, in the face of such terrible physical suffering.’ Soon afterwards, a Mass-Observation study of weeping in cinemas found that whereas men tended to weep at moments of reserve in a film, women wept at moments of parting and loss – here, when Scott says goodbye to his wife on the quay and when the ponies are shot. One adolescent male could have wept with frustration. Having taken the 15-year-old Joan Rowlands (the future Joan Bakewell) to their local picture house in Stockport and found her discouragingly unresponsive to his advances, he turned to her and declared that she was as cold as the film.6.

  Cinema’s nemesis was still at the fledgling stage. In February 1949 the Sunday Pictorial (in effect the Sunday version of the Daily Mirror) revealed ‘The Truth About British Television’:

  Are the programmes bad?

  Yes. Transmission most days is only an hour in the afternoon and about two hours in the evening . . . Afternoon programmes are mainly old American films. They are terrible . . . Major sports promoters are bitterly opposed to television because they know attendances will suffer. Consequently most sportscasts are of amateur events . . . Variety programmes are poor because the big combines put a television ban on their stars.

  Nevertheless, between June 1948 and March 1949 the number of television licences doubled from 50,000 to 100,000. Moreover, by 1949 there were, a BBC inquiry found, ‘unmistakeable signs of TV becoming less and less a “rich man’s toy”’ – indeed, by the start of the year, ‘although TV was still relatively more common in wealthy than in less comfortable homes . . . more than half the TV sets in use were in Lower Middle Class and Working Class homes’.

  Mass-Observation at about this time asked its national panel (‘generally above average in intelligence and education’) for its views on television. Only 2 per cent of the 684 respondents owned a set, which had cost almost £100, but about half wanted one (‘Can st
ay at home for entertainment’ and ‘Educational, widens and stimulates interest’ were the two main reasons), and many tended to see it as inevitable anyway. ‘No, I won’t have television – until all my neighbours have it’ was how a 33-year-old publicity assistant put it. One-third were definitely opposed, while even those wanting one, especially the female panellists, emphasised Television’s prospective disadvantages. ‘I would very much like to have a television set in my own home,’ noted a young housewife, ‘but I’m afraid that my needlework and mending and all the jobs which normally get done in the evening, would be sadly neglected.’