Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  It was a month since devaluation. ‘Everybody is waiting to hear what cuts & changes the Gov. will make on Mon.,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton on Saturday the 22nd. ‘Attlee will speak. It is supposed to be drastic & touch us all. People fearing clothes rationing have been buying a lot.’ Two days later did Attlee indeed speak to the nation, outlining expenditure cuts amounting to some £250 million and emphasising that his government had ‘sought to make them in such a way as not to impair seriously the great structure of social services which has been built up and which we intend to preserve’. The package included reductions in capital (including housing and education) and defence expenditure, but one listener, Judy Haines, naturally saw it from the point of view of a Chingford housewife trying like everyone else to make ends meet. ‘More austerity to cope with devaluation of £,’ she recorded. ‘Drs prescriptions 1/ – or what they’re worth if less; dried egg dearer; decontrol of fish prices.’ The most controversial aspect was the new intention, barely 15 months into the life of the NHS, to charge for prescriptions. A swiftly taken Gallup poll revealed that although 44 per cent were opposed to this policy shift, as many as 51 per cent agreed with it. Overall, reckoned Anthony Heap in St Pancras, the expenditure cuts – ‘anxiously awaited’ for the previous two or three weeks – were ‘in no way as alarming as we’d been led to expect’. Given that a general election was due within the next nine months, it would have been surprising if they had been.

  Life, though, remained difficult enough in the last autumn of the 1940s. ‘Wanted: A Housewives’ Strike’ was the provocative title of a Picture Post article in late October, detailing the high prices of everyday items compared with pre-war and producing a predictable flood of supportively indignant readers’ letters. ‘One of the biggest rackets at the present time is the high price of sanitary towels, surely an absolute necessity,’ wrote Mrs Laurel Garrad from Weston-super-Mare. ‘Is it possible to organise a real nation-wide housewives’ strike?’ Joan Comyns from Carshalton, for all her similar anger, thought not: ‘Pans have to be bought to cook for one’s family; darning wool must be paid for, or children go sockless to school; string is necessary to tie up parcels to send to loved ones. I have tried to strike about face towels, and have cut up every conceivable bit of garment which might do for them. Tell me, how can we strike, except by continually placing worried heads in gas ovens?’ The middle class, as ever, was at the cutting edge of the masochism that accompanied austerity’s trials and tribulations. ‘Excellent women enjoying discomfort – one bar of a small electric fire, huddled in coats,’ the soon-to-be-published Barbara Pym, still living in Pimlico, suggestively jotted in her notebook in November. For that questionably excellent man, Henry St John, it was not so much self-abnegation as grumbling that remained a way of life. ‘I had a poor lunch in Lyons’ cafeteria at Hammersmith,’ he recorded about the same time, ‘where a clearer-up told me trays were to be put in a “rack”, by which she meant a trolley.’ Not long afterwards, on 8 December, a young Czech woman arrived in England, staying in the capital for a few days before travelling north:

  There were still bombed-out ruins all over London, and the post-war drabness was far worse than that in Prague. The English women I saw walking about London seemed to me sloppily dressed, with scarves tied round their heads and cigarettes hanging from their lips. The shops, too, were a great disappointment to me. I had expected wonderful shops, but most of what I saw in London shop windows seemed to me to be shoddy stuff, with little attempt to display it elegantly.2.

  These recollections belonged to Olga Cannon, recently married to the determined, high-minded Les Cannon, Lancashire’s representative on the executive of the Electrical Trades Union and still a fully committed Communist.

  For some 6,000 people, most of them young, 1949 was the year of being struck down by polio – in 657 cases fatally. Ian Dury was seven when in August he contracted it in the open-air swimming pool at Southend: ‘I then went to my granny’s in Cornwall for a couple of weeks’ holiday, an incubation period, and it developed. I spent six weeks in an isolation hospital in Truro, because I was infectious. I was encased in plaster, both arms and both legs. My mum came down on the milk train and they said I was going to die but I rallied round after six months in the Royal Cornish Infirmary. They took me back to Essex on a stretcher.’ His left side remained paralysed for a time, and thereafter he walked with a pronounced limp. Another victim, Julian Critchley, was eighteen when one Saturday morning in early November he ‘set out to walk to John Barnes, the department store next to Finchley Road tube station, but felt so ill I was compelled to turn back and make my way home’. By Tuesday, after three feverish days in bed and with his left leg much the weaker, it was clear that he had what his anxious parents had not brought themselves to say aloud. ‘It is hard to exaggerate how frightened people were of polio,’ he recalled many years later about a disease of which for a long time from 1947 there was a serious outbreak every summer:

  In August, swimming-pools would be closed [but presumably not in Southend] as a precaution; the press would be full of speculation as to its cause; at one time it was believed that the virus was spread by excrement deposited on railway lines by passing trains. There was no cure; no way in which the paralysis, which occurred once the fever diminished, could be halted; it could lead to death by suffocation or, even worse, a life imprisoned in an iron lung. I was fortunate; the paralysis stopped at my right buttock, robbing me of the ability to run (I could not stand on tip-toe on my right leg) and withering the calf and thigh.

  Critchley was back from hospital by Christmas, but for many there were long weeks (or more) in the dreaded iron lung – a huge, fearsome contraption that made the patient feel he or she was being buried alive – followed by almost punitive physiotherapy, with little or no allowance made for human frailty. ‘I’m not having any bent cripples going out of this ward’ was how one specialist put it to a young sufferer, Marjorie Crothers. ‘You will go out vertical if it kills both of us.’ Across in the United States, whose greatest President had been stricken by polio, the race was on to produce an effective vaccine, but no one knew when or if that might happen.

  Mercifully, most children were polio-free. For Judy Haines’s two little girls, late November brought the novelty of a double pushchair. ‘Joy of joys!’ their mother wrote (on the same Tuesday as St John’s unsatisfactory meal at Lyons):

  My dear Mother-in-law came round & minded children, washed up, prepared vegetables & did ironing while I went to Percival’s, High St & bought cream and fawn folding car for £7.15. 8d. It’s just what I’ve dreamed of (except colour, which was all they had). I can tuck babes up in travelling rug & use the cushion-covers I embroidered & take them out in all weathers. Oh I’m so thrilled ! It’s coming tomorrow. Do hope it does.

  It did. ‘Oh happy day! Lucky me!’ she gleefully recorded. For small children everywhere that winter, there were two new delights that between them would go a long way to defining a whole era of childhood. Enid Blyton’s latest creation, hard on the heels of the Secret Seven, included (in her explanatory words to her publisher) not only ‘toys, pixies, goblins, Toyland, brick-houses, dolls houses, toadstool houses, market-places’ but also ‘Noddy (the little nodding man), Big Ears the Pixie, and Mr and Mrs Tubby (the teddy bears)’. First up in the series was Little Noddy Goes to Toyland, seductively illustrated by a Dutch artist, Harmsen Van Der Beek; it and its rapidly produced successors were soon selling by the million. Then on the third Monday of 1950, at 1.45 p.m. on the Light Programme, were heard these even more seductive words: ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’ There followed a quarter of an hour of stories and deliberately rather pedestrianly sung songs – a hit from the start. ‘First reports indicate that Listen with Mother, the programme for “under fives”, is being received with enthusiasm by little children,’ noted BBC audience research in March. ‘We know of one small boy who said to his mother at breakfast, “Aren’t you e’ sited when Listen with Mother comes
on?” and of another who fairly pushes his mother out of the room at 1.44 each day on the grounds that the programme is not for her!’3.

  On 17 December, almost exactly a month before Listen with Mother’s debut, the great childminder of the future had taken another big step forward. ‘Television Marches On’ declared the Listener in an editorial to mark the opening at Sutton Coldfield of ‘the world’s biggest and most advanced television station’ – the BBC’s first high-power transmitter outside the London area, bringing television into the orbit of much of the Midlands. Advance local reaction was distinctly nervous. ‘Change in our habits television will certainly bring,’ reckoned one Birmingham paper. ‘Let us hope, however, that the change will be less drastic than is feared.’ Another expressed only quasi-confidence that ‘if it is necessary in some households to exercise some form of disciplinary restraint, it should be possible to do this without overmuch wrangling’ – in which regard ‘the setting aside of a television room may be advisable’. Unsurprisingly, the press was out in force on the opening evening, a Saturday. ‘No more snooker at the club for me if there’s sport or opera being televised,’ declared Mr H. A. Catton of 63 Silhill Hall Road, Solihull; over in Warwards Lane, Selly Oak, not only did Mrs M. Walker profess herself ‘absolutely amazed’ and predict that ‘this will be the death knell of the cinemas,’ but in the next-door house six-year-old Martin Woodhams resolutely refused to budge from his seat until ten o’clock. For the moment at least, Norman Collins spoke in vain as Controller of Television: ‘Please don’t let the children view too much. At least send the little beasts to bed when the time comes.’

  The new transmitter marked a significant stage in the television audience becoming more representative of society as a whole, but the fact remained that by the end of March 1950 there were still only 343,882 sets in the country, in other words in fewer than one home in 20. Nevertheless, given that the total number of sets a year earlier had been a mere 126,567, there could be little doubt that television was the coming medium. Writing not long before the Sutton Coldfield opening in the BBC Quarterly (a revealingly self-important title), the director-general, Sir William Haley, fondly anticipated the time when television would result in something ‘which, working with all the other beneficent influences within the community, will have the capacity to make for a broader vision and a fuller life’. The Listener, in its by now well-accustomed role as cultural watchdog, naturally agreed: ‘That the extended service now opening will bring a fresh pleasure to thousands is hardly to be doubted. That television, as it spreads, may bring about a keener, more sensitive, and more intelligent appreciation on the part of all who see it of the world about us – this is a hope that cannot be too often emphasised.’ Early in the New Year, the BBC’s newly established Television Panel (of about 2,500, from almost 25,000 applications) started watching programmes in order to provide the Corporation with feedback. ‘A very high proportion of sets,’ reported the first bulletin on its activities, ‘are switched on for the main Light Entertainment show on Saturday nights’, notably Vic Oliver Introduces – not quite what Haley had in mind. In one home in Chingford, all such concerns were purely academic. ‘The girls draw up their chairs for a Hopalong Cassidy film,’ noted Judy Haines on 9 January, ‘but the Demonstration Film (with a visit to the zoo) remains their favourite.’4.

  The people’s will was about to be expressed. Florence Speed in Brixton noted caustically on New Year’s Day how ‘for the forthcoming election, several things have been taken off points [rationing] for the period starting today’ – including ‘canned meat puddings, canned pork hash or sausage meat, boneless chicken, turkey, rabbit, spaghetti &sausages in tomato sauce, vegetable & macaroni casserole, canned tomatoes, snoek & mackerel’. Three days later, Michael Young in Labour’s research department wrote to his Dartington benefactors, the Elmhirsts. ‘What on earth am I doing hurling myself into this election organisation, thinking out ways of outwitting the Tories?’ he asked. ‘And yet I do so much want this odd, pedestrian, earthy and loveable Party to win. I am fearful of what would happen to our society if the Conservatives succeed. And they may.’ Eventually, on the 10th, Attlee formally announced that the general election would be held on Thursday, 23 February. He and Herbert Morrison would have preferred to go in May, by when it might have been possible to deration petrol, but his Chancellor, the ailing Stafford Cripps, was adamant that it would be immoral to deliver a budget just before an election – and threatened to resign over the issue. Such was Cripps’s standing in the country, even after devaluation, that Attlee felt he had no alternative but to yield to Cripps’s wishes. But as he remarked privately and with some asperity of his colleague, ‘He’s no judge of politics.’5.

  The election was not yet in full swing when on the 26th at the Old Bailey a 29-year-old ‘company director’ called Donald Hume – in reality a spiv who specialised in aerial smuggling, of goods or people or currency – was found not guilty of murdering Stanley Setty, a used-car dealer, but was given 12 years for being an accessory after the fact. The verdict came some three months after the discovery of Setty’s headless and legless body in a parcel floating in the marshes at Tillingham, Essex. Hume was a member of the United Services Flying Club at Elstree, and while denying the murder, he admitted that he had dropped the parcel from his plane. ‘For no other reason than for money, the sum of £150,’ declared the judge in sentencing him, ‘you were prepared to take parts of a body and keep the torso in your flat [above a greengrocers’ shop in the Finchley Road] overnight, and then take it away and put it in the Thames Estuary.’ A manifestly sensational case, it received massive press coverage – and hardly suggested that the quality of the English murder was in decline. As it happened, George Orwell’s funeral took place at Christ Church, Albany Street (lesson chosen by Anthony Powell, clergyman ‘excessively parsonical’, coffin poignantly long) on the same bitterly cold Thursday as the verdict on Hume.

  The case almost entirely overshadowed another murder trial earlier in the month. On the 13th, also at the Old Bailey, a mentally backward 29-year-old lorry driver called Timothy Evans – originally from near Merthyr Tydfil but for the previous two years living at 10 Rillington Place, a tiny house in a cul-de-sac near Ladbroke Grove Tube station – was found guilty of murdering his pregnant wife and one-year-old daughter. In effect the police had had to identify as the murderer either Evans or the occupant of the ground-floor flat, John (‘Reg’) Christie, a 51-year-old Yorkshireman who during the war had served for four years as a special constable based at Harrow Road police station. Perhaps inevitably, they chose to believe in the innocence of the former copper. Some five weeks after the trial, Evans had his appeal dismissed by Lord Chief Justice Goddard and his colleagues, and on 9 March, at Pentonville Prison, he was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint. His last words to his mother and sister were the same: ‘Christie done it.’6.

  The Blue Lamp premiered less than a week after Evans had been sent down. Starring Jack Warner as a kindly, imperturbable, home-loving, pipe-smoking, begonia-growing veteran police constable called George Dixon – attached to Paddington Green station, less than two miles from Rillington Place – it was dedicated to the British Police Service and unquestioningly endorsed its fight against crime. Early on, the maturely authoritative voice-over sets out the film’s defining context. After referring to childhoods in homes ‘broken and demoralised by war’, the male voice goes on:

  These restless and ill-adjusted youngsters have produced a type of delinquent which is partly responsible for the post-war increase in crime. Some are content with pilfering and petty theft. Others, with more bravado, graduate to serious offences. Youths with brain enough to plan and organise criminal adventures and yet who lack the code, experience and self-discipline of the professional thief – which sets them as a class apart, all the more dangerous because of their immaturity. Young men such as these two present a new problem to the police.