Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  A little coloured girl watching with us thought that Andy should have a coloured friend to play with.

  It seems that slow inconspicuous movements on the screen, unaccompanied by commentary, will quickly lose child’s attention.

  The most popular song, with all ages, seemed to be ‘Andy’s hands go up – Andy’s hands go down’ – and this was often remembered afterwards in play.

  The respondents also expressed their attitude to children’s television as such. ‘One very general argument, which seemed to many parents to be the most important factor, was that children, however young, were almost invariably fascinated by the screen and determined to watch it, so that it was only sensible to offer them something of their own.’ From mid-September Andy Pandy settled down to every Tuesday (initially at 3.45) and it did not finally leave the screen until the 1970s. Amazingly, only 26 actual black-and-white programmes were ever made; we got to know them well.28

  On the day before the clown suit’s first public outing, the England cricket selectors announced that neither Norman Yardley (the then captain) nor George Mann (a recent captain) would be available to skipper the forthcoming winter tour of Australia. Over the next fortnight, there was intense press speculation about who would get the job. From his influential pulpit in the Daily Telegraph, E. W. Swanton reckoned that the two most plausible candidates were Freddie Brown, an amateur, and Tom Dollery, a professional. As it happened, they were the respective captains in the time-honoured annual encounter at Lord’s between the Gentlemen (ie the amateurs) and the Players (ie the professionals), starting on 26 July. On the first day, Brown made a superb century, reaching three figures with a straight six into the pavilion. ‘The more elderly were reminded of how cricket used to be played,’ noted an admiring Swanton, ‘and especially how the ball used to be driven before the game’s descent, as many would lament, to an age of over-sophistication and a dreary philosophy of safety first.’ Next day, Dollery himself scored an admirable century, but within minutes of his declaration and the Gentlemen leaving the field, Brown had been invited to take the side to Australia. Given that there had never yet been a professional captain of England, it was hardly a surprising choice. And, in the eyes of many cricket followers, the appointment was a welcome indication that the amateur spirit of adventure was still alive and well.

  Even so, at county level there were clear signs by the 1950 season that – whatever the continuing determination of county committees not to appoint professional captains – the traditional two-class system in the first-class game was only just hanging on. Most of the counties had captains who were either ‘shamateurs’ (including Brown at Northamptonshire) or, if they could afford to play as genuine amateurs, were far from being worth their place in the side as cricketers. Somerset’s Stuart Rogers was an army officer with a disciplinarian streak – but did not bowl and averaged only 25.12 with the bat; Nottinghamshire’s William Sime, an Oxford-educated barrister, managed a mere 17. 78. The only two professionals in charge were Warwickshire’s Dollery and Sussex’s James Langridge, the latter after a ferocious pre-season row, as members revolted against the committee’s plan to appoint joint captains – both of them amateur, with one in effect a stand-in until the end of the Cambridge term. There was also this season, in early July, an emblematically antediluvian episode at Bristol. The Glouces-tershire captain was Basil Allen, an amateur who had captained the county before the war and was determined to uphold the established social order. Coming off the field for an interval, he overheard one of his young professionals, Tom Graveney, say, ‘Well played, David’ to an opposition batsman, Cambridge University’s David Sheppard (the future Bishop of Liverpool). A few minutes later in the pavilion, Allen went over to Sheppard. ‘I’m terribly sorry about Graveney’s impertinence,’ he apologised. ‘I think you’ll find it won’t happen again.’

  There was, too, a strongly hierarchical flavour about the composition of the touring party to accompany Brown. In particular, there was the inclusion of three young, palpably inexperienced, Cambridge-educated amateurs: Sheppard and J. G. Dewes had made a pile of runs on a university wicket widely recognised to be a batsman’s paradise, while the quick bowler J. J. Warr, likewise still an undergraduate that summer, had bowled well enough but unsensationally, coming 55th in the national averages. Significantly, their county affiliations were respectively Sussex, Middlesex and Middlesex again – socially very acceptable. That winter, for all Brown’s gallantry, England lost heavily. Sheppard and Dewes managed 74 runs between them in seven innings; Warr took one wicket for 281 runs. ‘Will one ever know what the Selectors were thinking of?’ lamented the novelist Rex Warner. And, writing to a moderately sympathetic Australian friend, he reckoned that ‘the abolition of the dictatorship of the M.C.C.’ was the only thing that might save English cricket.29

  It was just before Brown presented his calling card at Lord’s that Picture Post asked the question: ‘The Shop round the Corner: Does it Deserve to Survive?’ Against a background of ‘the small independent shop’ – numerically representing up to 90 per cent of retail-trade outlets, albeit little more than half the retail trade’s total turnover – coming under increasing pressure from the ‘chain stores and multiple shops’ that ‘had become almost household words’, the magazine’s Ruth Bowley entered an almost passionate plea for the defence. On the basis of spending several months travelling round Britain and talking to both shopkeepers and their customers, she was convinced that it would represent a huge loss ‘if all shopping was centralised’, even if it did clip a few points off the cost of living. ‘There is an informality about the small shop,’ she argued. ‘Tired housewives can pop in, dressed in kitchen aprons, men in dungarees call in on their way home from work. One customer I know regularly fetches his newspaper wearing his dressing-gown; another sends his dog. And always there is a welcome for the children, an intelligent interpretation of scribbled shopping lists, and a touching interest in child welfare.’ To clinch her point, she quoted the proprietress of a village shop: ‘That’s the third ice today, Billy. I’ll not sell you any more until I hear from your Ma.’

  It was not a case that impressed one reader, ‘K.P.B.’ from London SW15:

  Living on a housing estate which is almost entirely served by small shopkeepers, I would emphatically deny the small shopkeepers’ right to survive.

  Indeed, such services as are rendered by the local butcher vary according to his estimate of the affluence of the customer. It is nauseating to perceive the fawning manner in which prompt and favourable treatment is bestowed on the ‘lady’ from the mansions surrounding the estate in preference to the housewives from the estate. And the newsagent, the baker, the greengrocer and the cobbler, ‘small men’ all, behave similarly.

  ‘How different it is,’ this reader declared, ‘to do business with the multiple stores and the co-operative societies who know nothing of one’s social or financial status and dispense their services impartially and with dispatch and civility.’30

  Unsurprisingly, Bowley did not mention the word ‘supermarket’; though the first British usage occurred at least as early as 1943, the term did not become general until the 1950s. Even so, by the late 1940s there were a few pioneers of American-style self-service – and in July 1950, Sainsbury’s put down a major marker by opening (in Croydon) its first self-service store. ‘Not everyone liked it,’ records the obituarist of Alan (later Lord) Sainsbury. ‘One customer threw a wire basket at him and a judge’s wife in Purley swore violently at him when she saw she was required to do the job of a shop assistant.’ It would be many years before ‘Q-less shopping’ (as Sainsbury’s liked to call it) became anything like the norm.

  For the time being, the more typical shopping experience was much more like that wonderfully evoked by Margaret Forster (born 1938) in her memoir of growing up in Carlisle. Once a week she and her sister would smarten up, put on clean clothes and with their mother catch a double-decker Ribble bus to go shopping ‘up street’. The mother carryin
g a large leather bag, her daughters flimsy but capacious string bags, they invariably got off at the Town Hall. There were five main staging posts in a wearing process that the young Margaret knew full well was a daughter’s duty quite as much as a mother’s:

  1. The covered market. Here the ritual began, as it ‘always had done all my mother’s life and her mother’s before her’. First stop was the butchers’ stalls (Cumberland sausage, potted meat, black pudding), followed by the fruit and vegetable stalls. ‘Nothing exotic, no pineapples or melons – I hadn’t yet seen such fruits – and no fancy foreign vegetables, just huge cabbages and cauliflowers and leeks and onions and millions of potatoes, millions.’ Last came the ‘butter women’, who ‘sat behind trestle tables, their butter and cheese arranged in front of them, the butter pats each with an individual crest’. It was invariably cold – stall-holders struggling to weigh things ‘with hands wrapped in two pairs of fingerless mittens’ – and ‘on the many wet days rain would sweep in and trickle down the main cobbled entrance until it became a veritable stream and puddles were hard to avoid’.

  2. Lipton’s. This was the mercifully warm port of call to buy tea and sliced cooked ham, involving ‘two different counters in the same shop’ and therefore ‘two different queues’. During the endless waiting, ‘everyone watched to see what others bought and whether any preferential treatment was being given by the assistants’. And when at last one got to the counter, the system of paying was still the time-consuming, pre-1914 method of ‘putting the money in cans which whizzed overhead to the central cash desk and then back again with the change wrapped in the bill’.

  3. Binn’s or Bullough’s. Going into either of Carlisle’s two prestigious department stores was usually the best bit of the trip. ‘We only bought small items there, things my mother knew were the same price everywhere. Reels of thread, press-studs, sometimes stationery, never anything expensive. The whole point was just to have a reason for going into Binn’s and savouring its graciousness. We never bought even the cheapest item of clothing there.’

  4. The Co-op. A large, depressing stone building in Botchergate, with drab-looking goods poorly displayed and poorly lit, this was in her mother’s eyes the only place to go for clothes. ‘The experience of shopping at the Co-op was dismal and there was no joy in our actual essential purchases – vests, knickers, socks and liberty bodices.’ Least of all in the bodices, which were ‘akin to a corset for the young’ but in whose ‘protective values against cold’ her mother ‘placed great faith’.

  5. The baker’s. This final stop, halfway along Lowther Street, was principally to buy bread (including ‘a special kind of treacle loaf and delicious teacakes’), but occasionally the girls were treated to cream doughnuts or chocolate éclairs ‘as a reward for enduring the Co-op’.

  Then at last it was time to catch the bus home. ‘That was it for another week. We’d been “up street” and my mother was exhausted, mainly with the stress caused by seeing so many things she wanted and couldn’t afford to buy.’31

  The summer of 1950 was also holiday time. For Colin Welland, 15 going on 16 and growing up in Newton-le-Willows in Lancashire, it was the opportunity for his first holiday independent of his parents, as he and two mates went to Butlin’s in Skegness. ‘Butlin’s holiday camps were a Valhalla for working-class kids,’ he recalled. ‘They were just like big schools, really. You had your houses, your discipline, your dining hall, your social activities, competitions – I remember getting to the final of the crown green bowling competition.’ In retrospect, he was struck by his naivety. ‘For instance, three girls asked us back to their chalet for a drink and we said, “No, thank you, we’re not thirsty.”’ Up the coast from Skegness was Cleethorpes, where another future actor and writer, the 17-year-old Joe Orton (still living with his parents on the Saffron Lane council estate in Leicester), went in August. ‘This confirmed all I ever thought about day trips and I am certainly not going again in a hurry,’ he complained to his diary. ‘The tide was out and I was hungry. We couldn’t swim and the camp was rotten and Mum played up.’ One diarist, Florence Speed, was probably happy enough to be spending August at home in Brixton. ‘I was glad I wasn’t one of the queued-up holiday-makers,’ she reflected after calling in at a ‘packed’ Victoria station a week or so after Orton’s lament. ‘The people about to start on holiday displayed no holiday gaiety. Just stood huddled & depressed, & some of them with babies in arms, tired before the journey began.’32

  Indeed, though one imagines otherwise as one looks at the period photos of the mainly happy, smiling faces on the packed British beaches, life’s problems did not go away just because it was the holiday season. The papers of the John Hilton Bureau citizens’ advisory service – dealing with up to 5,000 cases weekly – include ‘Extracts from Letters’ dated the last day of August 1950. Cumulatively they present a grim, if not necessarily representative, picture of mainly domestic misery in a hostile world:

  She would lock herself in the scullery if she couldn’t have her own way and then turn on the gas. I was hardened to her after a time and instead of pleading with her I just turned off the gas at the meter.

  Since starting my studies I have put some mental strain on myself which is doing my health no good . . . They asked me to learn LOGARITHMS which I have never even heard of . . . I can’t see where it is all leading to.

  Now my wife never comes into my bedroom to see whether I am dead or alive and my nerves are greatly perturbed by this ordeal . . . I have been treated worse than a lodger.

  I had to give up my job in insurance and take a job where I could have milk and biscuits at 2-hourly intervals so I took over a public house.

  Me and my husband can’t understand why we can’t get no pension. My husband is no scholar.

  The most eloquent, desperate letter was the least punctuated: ‘No hope nothing to live for Only rude Man at Assistance Board’.

  There was as well – however little spoken about amid the sandcastles or in the problem pages – something else brewing that August, though it did not always command undivided attention. ‘The expected birth this week-end of Princess Elizabeth’s second baby,’ noted Speed on the 13th, ‘has pushed Korea into second place in the headlines this Sunday morning.’ Princess Anne duly arrived on the Tuesday; the day before, Nella Last in Barrow had another of her conversations with her husband:

  I’ve wondered if he worried about ‘outside’ affairs. I said today ‘it’s so worrying to hear so little definite progress of the Americans. A major war seems to be developing under our eyes, as if soon we will see it’s not a matter of “principle”, a gesture, but an out in the open war between Russia & the rest of the world.’ He said impatiently ‘you worry too much about what doesn’t concern you, & with all your worrying, you cannot alter or help things’.33

  11

  The Heaviest Burden

  ‘His vital energy, his good looks, his mellifluous voice, his vivid phraseology, make him a delight to listen to,’ reflected Sir Raymond Streat, chairman of the Cotton Board, after dining with Aneurin Bevan a few weeks before polling day in February 1950. In the ministerial car before dropping Streat off at his club, the conversation turned to the controversial centrepiece of Labour’s nationalisation plans:

  I talked of steel and said I was convinced it was folly. He spoke of the need for higher output: I said I thought it would all too soon be a case of excess production of steel in the world: he said the State would create outlets for steel by investing in great developments in the colonies and so forth: when I said we had to have surplus income before we could invest capital, his reply was something general and vague about the State being entitled to anticipate returns of investment. I spoke of the psychology of the business world whose technical skills were needed by society and how the steel case might destroy their ability to use their skills by snapping their faith in the future. Here he countered with a spate of eloquence. Steel represented the culmination of phase one of Labour Rule: if Labour blench
ed at the difficulty and held back, it would show its lack of faith in itself and its doctrine: no, steel must go on, or Labour would lose its very soul.

  ‘I found when I crept into bed that I was frightened,’ concluded Streat’s graphic account. ‘I don’t think I particularly want to see him again. No good is done. The experience seems pleasantly stimulating whilst it is taking place, but afterwards you feel you have been in a void where there are no morals or faiths or loves.’

  A month later, in early March, Bevan attended his first Cabinet meeting after Labour’s disappointing electoral performance. ‘Bevan was pugnacious and in a minority of one,’ noted another diarist, his fellow-minister Patrick Gordon Walker, about Bevan’s insistence that the implementation of steel nationalisation be in the forthcoming King’s Speech. ‘Morrison spoke strongly of the need for common sense and realism – this was what the country expected. It was no good “dressing up as revolutionaries” and pretending we had a great majority.’ The atmosphere, as evoked by Gordon Walker, was palpably uneasy:

  Bevan was very isolated and unpopular.

  Bevin looked ill.