Needing somewhere to live, Lessing spent six weeks ‘tramping the streets with a guidebook, standing in queues outside telephone booths, examining advertisement boards’. These were weeks of ‘interminable streets of tall, grey, narrow houses’ with ‘pale faces peering up from basements, innumerable dim flights of stairs, rooms crowded with cushioned and buttoned furniture, railings too grimy to touch, dirty flights of steps – above all, an atmosphere of stale weariness’. Eventually she met a jeweller’s assistant called Rose, who found for Lessing and her small boy a garret in the working-class lodging-house in Denbigh Road, Notting Hill, where she herself lived. ‘I don’t care who gets in, I’ll get a smack in the eye either way’ was Rose’s view of politics. ‘When they come in saying “Vote for Me”, I just laugh.’ But Lessing, soon if not already aware of how the pervasive Cold War climate had sent many intellectuals running to (as she later put it) ‘The Ivory Tower’, was determined to keep a political edge to her life and writing.14
Walking in the Shade, Lessing’s compelling autobiography about her first 13 years in England, periodically includes brief sections on ‘the Zeitgeist, or how we thought then’. Included in the one relating to her early impressions is this quartet:
Britain was still best: that was so deeply part of how citizens thought, it was taken for granted. Education, food, health, anything at all – best. The British Empire, then on its last legs – the best.
Charity was for ever abolished by the welfare state. Never again would poor people be demeaned by gifts from others. Now we would dismantle all the apparatus of charity, the trusts, the associations, the committees. No more handouts.
In Oxford Street underground, I watched a little bully of an official hectoring and insulting a recently arrived West Indian who could not get the hang of the ticket mechanism. He was exactly like the whites I had watched all my life in Southern Rhodesia shouting at blacks. He was compensating for his own feelings of inferiority.
Everyone from abroad, particularly America, said how gentle, polite – civilized – Britain was.
The evidence suggests that in the late 1940s there was not invariably hostility towards black people. Mass-Observation, for example, reported that among young white factory girls in the cavernous dance halls there was ‘great competition to dance with the blacks’ on account of ‘their superb sense of rhythm’. But at least as often as not, there does seem to have been some degree of prejudice against the 25,000 or so (more than half living in either Cardiff’s ‘Tiger Bay’ dock area or the rundown streets of Liverpool’s South End) ‘coloured’ people in Britain, including Africans, Somalis and Sudanese Arabs as well as West Indians.
A Ministry of Labour survey in early 1949 found that in the Midlands black male workers were placed ‘in firms like Lucas, BSA, and Singers on dirty and rough finishing work’, but that ‘as regards vacancies in building, Post Office, transport, coalmining, railways, clerical, and draughtsmen’s work, coloured labour would not be accepted’. As for the employment, just starting, of West Indian women in NHS hospitals, a Home Office memo in March noted that ‘it has been found that the susceptibilities of patients tended to set an upper limit on the proportion of coloured workers who could be employed either as nurses or domiciliaries’. Soon afterwards, Harold Nicolson was prevailed upon by his friend Jimmy Mallon, Warden of Toynbee Hall, to give a lecture to the Citizens Council in Whitechapel. ‘I dined with him first at the Reform Club, and then we took a taxi to the East End,’ Nicolson related to his wife Vita Sackville-West. ‘My audience, I regret to say, consists very largely of West Indian negroes, who, it seems, have flooded into London in the hope of high wages. All they get are rude remarks, the denial of white women and a sense that they are shunned.’ ‘I do not think,’ he added, ‘that many of the Jamaicans, Haitians and Trinidadians who were present quite understood my elaborate explanation of tolerance and the democratic State.’15
By July it was just over a year since the Empire Windrush had docked at Tilbury, and during that time there had been only a trickle of further West Indian workers arriving in Britain, perhaps about 600. Even so, there existed sufficient tension for a Colonial Office working party on Britain’s black Caribbeans to suggest that month that ‘dispersal of these aggregations would lessen the special social problems which result from their presence’, thereby enabling them to ‘be trained in the British way of life’. At the same time, ‘Is There a British Colour Bar?’ was the question asked by Picture Post’s Robert Kee. He concluded, broadly speaking, that there was – ‘invisible, but like Wells’ invisible man it is hard and real to the touch . . . and it is when you get lower down the social scale that you find it hits the hardest’. It was, for instance, ‘often extremely difficult’ for a black man to find a furnished flat or room, and Kee quoted the classic landlady line: ‘I wouldn’t mind for myself. But there’s no telling what the other lodgers might say.’ As for getting a job, ‘the coloured man meets prejudice in connection with his employment from all classes’, including ‘the white workers themselves’. Kee’s article inspired some supportive letters, including one from the black British athlete McDonald Bailey, but D. R. Smith of Bramham Gardens, SW5, attacked his ‘drivelling cant’ and asked how he would feel about his daughter marrying a Negro: ‘While I am quite prepared to admit that there are many good people in the coloured races, we cannot recognise them by inter-marrying with them or by introducing them into our social life.’ G. Carter from Croxley Green, Herts, agreed: ‘One can hardly imagine the British people becoming a mulatto nation . . . I believe the best solution is to prevent any large number of coloured people taking up permanent residence in this country. Why import a social problem where one did not previously exist?’
Soon afterwards, in early August, there was an unpleasant episode in the West Midlands when 65 Jamaicans were expelled from Causeway Green Hostel near Oldbury, following attacks on them by the more numerous Poles staying there. ‘It is no good arguing about the matter’ was the response of one of those expelled, Harold Wilmot, an ex-airman who had been six years in England. ‘We are black men, and must bear the black man’s burden.’ Another, Horace Halliburton, a skilled metal turner who was still looking for work 15 months after arriving in England, wrote an eloquent article for the Birmingham Gazette. ‘What really annoys my countrymen,’ he emphasised, ‘is the constant baiting and jeering which is directed at the coloured man. He is unrepresented and invariably victimised.’ As evidence, he quoted what an Employment Exchange manager in Birmingham had said to him: ‘I am sorry for you. It is talent wasted, but the factories will not employ coloured men. Do not blame us. Blame the management – and they in turn will blame their employees. British workmen do not like sharing their benches with a coloured man and that is an end to it.’ ‘Even the landladies at boarding-houses will not have us as lodgers,’ Halliburton added in confirmation of Kee’s finding, before ending on a wrenching, even pitiful note: ‘I am heartbroken when I hear mothers point out a coloured man to their children and say: “I’ll set the black bogy man on you if you are not well behaved.”’16
‘Very serious dollar situation,’ noted Hugh Dalton, senior minister and former Chancellor, in his diary for 15 June 1949, less than two years after the convertibility crisis. ‘Cripps says that the danger is that, within twelve months, all our [gold] reserves will be gone. This time there is nothing behind them, and there might well be “a complete collapse of sterling”.’ Over the next three months there was a curious disjunction: the balance-of-payments position remained dire; international (especially American) confidence in the British economy steadily deteriorated; the country’s threadbare reserves continued to drain away; Sir Stafford Cripps authorised a new round of cuts in imports, ie trying to reduce dollar expenditure while formally denying that he intended to devalue sterling; the financial markets operated on the tacit understanding that the currency (long thought to be overvalued at $4.03 to the pound, the rate agreed at the outbreak of war) would be devalued sooner rather
than later; and The Times published many letters that sought to diagnose the causes of Britain’s economic problems. Yet, perhaps because it was summer, there was no great sense of crisis felt by the mass of the population. ‘Any visitor hoping to discover what the ordinary Londoner is thinking about the dollar crisis could wear his ear off laying it to the ground, and get no result,’ Panter-Downes rather plaintively remarked at the start of September. ‘What he is currently talking about is his holiday or the drought or the new price cuts in utility clothing.’ She went on:
Short of the Prime Minister coming to the microphone and saying, ‘Sorry, no rations next week,’ it is hard to see how the worker can be made to realise that things are critical when, from his angle, they are looking nothing less than prosperous. Though Britain’s vital dollar exports are down, their industry is still managing to show every sign of lively good health, to judge by the full employment and increased productivity. Some luxury lines, always the first to feel the pinch, are feeling it, but on the whole the industrial picture is so surprisingly, if deceptively, bright that there is every reason for workers to believe that if this is a crisis, it’s the most comfortable crisis they ever took a ride in.17
It was enough, she might have added, to make a Times letter-writer despair, let alone a government exhorting ever-greater efforts.
The eventual decision to devalue was a slow, painful and at times muddled one, not helped by Cripps being in a Swiss sanatorium for part of July and most of August. The process included a perceived act of double-crossing, a heated discussion about bread, and a critical if predictable non-decision.
In Cripps’s prolonged absence, the three ministers left in day-to-day charge of economic matters were Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson and Douglas Jay. Gaitskell and Jay were pro-devaluation, viewing it as preferable to deflation and likely to enhance competitiveness, while Wilson was seemingly of a similar mind. But at a crucial meeting at Chequers, he appeared to be covering his back, leading on Gaitskell’s part to a permanent attitude of mistrust towards him. ‘What emerged during the summer of 1949,’ Wilson’s straight-as-a-die adviser Alec Cairncross recalled, ‘was Harold’s fondness for keeping his options open, his disinclination to say unpalatable things to his colleagues, his tendency to see economic issues in purely political terms (in this case, the date of the next election) and, most of all, his deviousness.’
On 12 September, just over a fortnight after the Cabinet had reluctantly concluded that there was no alternative to devaluation, Cripps and Ernest Bevin were both in the British Embassy at Washington, where together they decided what the new fixed value of sterling should be. Among those present was the Treasury’s Sir Edwin Plowden:
There were two rates put forward, $2.80 and $3.00, and I think the majority of us felt that $2.80 was the right rate. When we went upstairs to a meeting in Ernie Bevin’s sitting room, he’d been ill and he was still in his dressing gown and pyjamas. Stafford was there and his view was that $3.00 was the right rate and we argued for the lower rate. Ernie then turned to me and said, ‘What effect will this have on the price of the standard loaf of bread?’ Fortunately, thinking he would ask this, I’d sent a cable to the Treasury asking what effect it will have. It was a penny. We put that forward and he said, ‘Oh all right, but I hope we can have a whiter loaf. It makes me belch, this stuff.’ So it wasn’t the $2.80 argument that was decided, it was the price of bread that decided it.
So, $2.80 it was – but in the event, without (to Bevin’s regret and Cripps’s nutritional satisfaction) going back to the pre-war white loaf. ‘When they looked into the cost,’ Cairncross subsequently explained, ‘it turned out that there would be more dollars involved because they would have to buy offal and throw it away and need more flour, so to speak, than otherwise and that caused the Treasury to oppose it.’
The non-decision was the failure to give serious consideration to the economic merits of floating the pound, so that it no longer had a fixed value that had to be defended at nearly all costs. But for the instinctively dirigiste Cripps and his fellow-ministers, such a market-oriented policy was almost beyond the bounds of rationality. ‘If by a floating rate its sponsors mean to imply that all our exchange and import controls should be taken off and the pound allowed to find its own level,’ he told the Commons soon after devaluation, ‘we could not possibly think of such a course.’18
Cripps announced devaluation to the nation on the evening of Sunday, 18 September. After an explanation of what he was doing and why, together with a ‘most earnest’ appeal to manufacturers and exporters to ‘redouble their efforts’ and an insistence that ‘this is a step that we cannot and shall not repeat’, there was one passage in his broadcast that had a particular resonance:
We have decided upon these steps because we are determined not to try and solve our problem at the cost of heavy unemployment, or by attacking the social services that have been expanded over the last few years. This drastic change is the only alternative and it offers us a chance of a great success, but only if we all play the game and do not try to take advantage of one another; if we take fair shares of our difficulties as well as of our benefits.
Different listeners reacted in different ways. ‘Cripps very parsonical in an evangelical sort of way,’ thought Malcolm Muggeridge, while for Vere Hodgson it was ‘a lot of meaningless soft soap’, though she added that ‘he was upset to announce it’. The unforgiving Kenneth Preston in Keighley recorded grimly that ‘Cripps has had to eat his words’ and reflected that ‘the dollar has come to assume such an importance in our lives at present that, as Vallance [his local vicar] said this morning [ie in church], the dollar bill, in the minds of some people, has come to take the place formerly occupied by God as the universal provider’. For one diarist, as no doubt for many other listeners, the global seamlessly merged into the local. ‘It sounded like a schoolmaster explaining citizenship to young people,’ noted Gladys Langford. ‘I cannot believe people will respond to his plea for more and more effort. They have been offered nothing but disappointment for so long. I wonder how long before Mr Lee raises our rents?’
In her next letter to the The New Yorker, Panter-Downes described the wider impact:
The devaluation of the pound went off like a bomb that you can hear coming but that makes you jump just the same. The public is still rocking from the startling effects of the explosion, unsure as to whether things will be looking better or worse when, eventually, the smoke clears. Certainly a good deal of the shock proceeded from the fact that the Chancellor had become identified in most people’s mind with the maintaining of the precious pound sterling. All his utterances on the subject had given the impression that he intended to stand or fall with it. Though making allowances for the necessary lack of frankness preceding the operation, even those Britons who expected devaluation seem somewhat astonished by the briskness with which he has bent the pound, not to mention its staggering new angle.
The morning after, Cripps himself held a large press conference, at which, according to Panter-Downes, he ‘looked far more a spruce figure at a wedding, come to give away a cherished daughter, than a coroner sitting on the facts of a sensational demise’. Indeed, ‘the assembled journalists hadn’t a chance against a fascinating performance that crackled with good humor and vigor’. Nevertheless, whatever the economic arguments in its favour, the very fact of devaluation inevitably had powerful connotations of volte-face and humiliation. These were not connotations that any political party would want to be associated with twice in living memory.
The day that Panter-Downes wrote her letter, Thursday the 22nd, saw the staging at Wembley of the first World Speedway Championship since the war. No fewer than 500,000 cinder-track fans applied for the 85,000 tickets on sale in advance. It was a sport that had been invented only in the late 1920s, gates in the current season were already up by more than a million on the previous year, and 16 riders were due to compete for speedway’s greatest honour, never previously won by a home rider. The Daily
Mirror headline the next day celebrated a triumphant outcome: ‘93,000 Cheer The New Speed King – An Englishman!’ Tommy Price had won all five races, and for ‘a wildly cheering crowd’ the question of a new exchange rate was, for a few hours anyway, neither here nor there.19
4
A Decent Way of Life
‘I was sorry myself to miss Wilfred,’ Nella Last in Barrow noted in her diary on 14 October 1949 (ten days after her sixtieth birthday) about missing that Friday evening’s edition of Have a Go, starring the great Pickles – probably the most popular man in the country. ‘It’s not just that I like his handling of people, it’s the “genuine” feeling I get – of homely every day people, with humour, courage & ideals as steadfast as ever, in spite of all the talk of “decadence”, slacking, problem youth, etc, etc, which seems so insistently brought to sight nowadays, in press, books & cinema.’ The next afternoon, 37,978 squeezed into Meadow Lane to watch Notts County trounce the visitors Bristol City 4–1. Tommy Lawton at centre forward was ‘his usual brilliant self’, according to the local reporter, A. E. Botting, and scored County’s fourth after ‘a typical solo burst’. One watchful presence in the exultant crowd was probably Alan Sillitoe, who transmuted the experience into a short story, ‘The Match’, with County going down to a bitter defeat. As the mist rolls in from the Trent and it becomes impossible to see the advertising boards above the stands ‘telling of pork pies, ales, whisky, cigarettes and other delights of Saturday night’, one of the characters bites his lip with anger. ‘“Bloody team. They’d even lose at blow football.” A woman behind, swathed in a thick woollen scarf coloured white and black like the Notts players, who had been screaming herself hoarse in support of the home team all the afternoon, was almost in tears: “Foul! Foul! Get the dirty lot off the field. Send ’em back to Bristol where they came from. Foul! Foul I tell yer.”’ Still, whatever a weekend’s ups and downs, there was always Variety Bandbox on Sunday evening, with some 20 million regularly tuning in. ‘Now, ah, Ladies and Gentle-men,’ began the star turn’s ‘lion tamer’ monologue on the 16th. ‘Harken. Now – harken. This is, no – harken! Now har-ken! Har-ever-so-ken! Now, that’s the life: the circus! What? That’s the life! If you live. I know! What? I’m telling you this. Liss-en! There’s one phase in my life, there’s one phase – and I never forget a phase! Ha ha ha ha! Every gag fresh from the quipperies!’1. The script was by Eric Sykes, and for the intense, insecure man delivering his lines, Frankie Howerd, these were golden days.
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