Indeed, it was an egalitarian urge that largely lay behind the hardening rank-and-file mood in the Labour Party by the early 1950s in favour of comprehensive education, with a view to abolishing the divide between grammars and secondary moderns. By the summer of 1951, following intensive pressure from the National Association of Labour Teachers, this was official party policy – but it did not mean that most Labour ministers agreed with it. As Minister of Education since early 1947, George Tomlinson had consistently upheld the primacy of the grammar school and did little to encourage those backing the comprehensive or ‘multilateral’ alternative. With few exceptions, he either blocked, delayed or watered down the various proposals for new comprehensive schools that came across his desk. He was much struck by the way in which support for comprehensives had proved a vote-loser for Labour at the Middlesex County Council elections in 1949; and, as he frankly if privately put it in early 1951, ‘the Party are kidding themselves if they think that the comprehensive school has any popular appeal.’ Most Labour local authorities, certainly outside Greater London, were similarly cautious. Even in Coventry, which in 1949 came down decisively in favour of comprehensives, the move has been convincingly attributed far less to ideology than to such practical considerations as ‘post-war accommodation, overcrowding, the poor quality of the buildings and the demand for secondary school places from the local population’.
Across England and Wales, the overwhelming force in the early 1950s was still with the actual grammars rather than the notional comprehensives, hardly any of which yet existed. The grammars enjoyed enormous prestige, both locally and nationally. There persisted a widespread, understandable belief that they provided a unique – and, since 1944, uniquely accessible – upwards social escalator for the talented and hard-working; there was a desire to give secondary moderns, the other side of the coin, time to prove themselves; the necessarily large size of London’s planned comprehensives, involving a roll of more than 2,000 children in each (in order to achieve a viable sixth form) as opposed to the 800 or so of the average grammar, was a major drawback to those indifferent to the egalitarian aspect; and, of course, the Burt-led orthodoxy about intelligence testing still held almost unchallengeable sway.16
Inevitably, the challenge of educating a new, post-war generation was much on people’s minds. It was certainly on the mind of the writer and journalist Laurence Thompson, who between the autumn of 1950 and the spring of 1951 travelled the country to produce Portrait of England – subtitled News from Somewhere in homage to William Morris, whose News from Nowhere had predicted 1952 as, in Thompson’s words, ‘the year of revolution from which Utopia sprang’. In London he was told that as many as a quarter of pupils at grammar schools were removed by their parents at 15 in order to enter the labour market; in Manchester he visited several schools; and elsewhere he was told by a chief education officer of how the situation looked on the frontline. ‘Ten per cent above average, fifty to sixty per cent average, and the rest can’t really benefit from anything we teach them,’ declared his battle-hardened witness. ‘The proportions will always be the same, and the problem will always be that below-average minority. All we can hope to do is to swing them over into reasonably decent citizens.’ One of the schools Thompson visited in Manchester was a primary, where he was shown ‘some extempore prayers’ written by children due to take the 11-plus at the end of the calendar year. ‘Most contained phrases like, “Lord, help me to work quicker and work harder until December comes.”’
Generally, Thompson was struck in that city by how the ‘clash between what parents want and what educationists think they ought to have’ ran ‘right through the system’. After depicting, not implausibly, the fairly brutal home environment of many infant-school pupils – ‘these children return to a harassed mother, who has perhaps just rushed home from work, to the quick-tempered clout on the ear, the impatient command, the necessity for getting them out of the way, somehow, while mum gets hubby’s dinner ready, during which of course she has no time to be interested, as teacher has, in their small achievements’ – he went on: ‘The result is a mess, and when junior and secondary modern school teachers, with classes much too large, receive these unfortunate hybrids of enlightened education and unenlightened homes, they complain bitterly about “lack of discipline”. And yet these children will be, one hopes, just a little more enlightened than their parents.’
Thompson’s ruminations, up to this point entirely characteristic of a generation of activators in their unquestioning assumption of a hierarchy of values, culminated when he went to watch the girls of a secondary modern school in a ‘mixed’ area give a gymnastic display:
They had the lithe, long-limbed grace which schoolgirls have, and schoolboys have not. They swung from ropes and leapt over horses with a panache and freedom of limb which took my breath away. I found myself thinking, in the gloomy way one does, that in a few years they would be doping themselves with the pictures three times a week in order to endure their stuffy offices and factories; they would be standing packed in buses; suffering the sniggering, furtive, unlovely approach to love in a cold climate; growing old under the burden of children, household duties, fear of war. But does that matter? For an hour they had flowered to perfection. Why must we always want more, more?17
‘Could you send me a carton of cigarettes?’ Vidia (V. S.) Naipaul asked his family in Trinidad soon after his arrival at Oxford in October 1950 to study at University College. ‘Everyone here smokes and everyone offers you, and I have fallen back into the habit . . . They are so expensive here.’ The next few months were a winter of not always welcome discovery. ‘I have eaten potatoes every day of my stay in England, twice a day at Oxford,’ he reported from London in December. And in January, back in Oxford:
The English are a queer people. Take it from me. The longer you live in England, the more queer they appear. There is something so orderly, and yet so adventurous about them, so ruttish, so courageous. Take the chaps in the college. The world is crashing about their heads, about all our heads. Is their reaction as emotional as mine? Not a bit. They ignore it for the most part, drink, smoke, and imbibe shocking quantities of tea and coffee, read the newspapers and seem to forget what they have read.
The following month, still in Oxford, the future novelist sounded like a future entrepreneur. ‘It is impossible to get rich,’ Naipaul grumbled to his family. ‘The income taxes are ridiculously high – about nine shillings in the pound after a certain stage, and it probably will go up with this heavy expenditure on re-armament.’ After noting that ‘everything has a purchase tax,’ he concluded: ‘For living, this country. For making money, somewhere else.’18
Naipaul was fortunate not to be a housewife during this first full winter of the 1950s – a winter of high prices and continuing, even in some cases worsening, shortages. Phyllis Willmott, by this time a young, hard-up mother living in Hackney, reflected in November on the damage being done to the Labour government, which she keenly supported:
I sometimes wonder whether any socialists apart from me are registered at our Co-op. ‘It’s near starvation – no other country in the world puts up with what we do. All the rest have all the meat they want,’ I heard someone moaning the other day. And the dreadful thing is that no one took the woman up on what she said. Certainly I didn’t. Everyone gave non-committal sighs and grunts. Of course, I should speak up. But why don’t I? One reason is because the housewife bit of me finds it hard to defend. I mean, 8d worth of meat! What housewife who has to queue for this can believe she and her other housewives have not got a grievance.
The Ministry of Food had badly messed up over the importation of meat, especially from the Argentine; the result was indeed a desperately inadequate weekly ration, working out at around 4 ounces of beefsteak or 5 ounces of imported lamb chops.
Another housewife, Nella Last in Barrow, recorded her shopping trip on the first Saturday of the New Year:
I wanted a rabbit – I didn’t feel like paying t
he 10d return on the bus to get 2/- worth of meat! I’d rubber Wellingtons, my W.V.S. overcoat and hooded mac on, but the cold seemed to penetrate & every one looked pinched & cold. I paid my grocery order & left one for Monday, & got last week’s & this week’s eggs – four. There was a really good display of meat in the window but no one was interested – tins of gammon ham about I should think 1 lb. were 9/6, & Danish & Dutch ‘minced pork in natural juices’ at 4/6 & 5/6 for quite a small tin. As one woman remarked ‘they don’t say any thing of the thick layer of fat, which with the “natural juices” made up more than half of the tin I got.’ By queuing, I could have got pork sausage for 1/10 a pound, but felt it mightn’t agree with either of us. Sausage nowadays seems to contain so much fat . . .
Exactly a week later, a third housewife, Judy Haines in Chingford, was also getting fed up. ‘I went out after dinner and what a joint!’ she recorded. ‘The ration is so small it’s very difficult to tell what cut it is at the best of times. Argentina seems to be putting a fast one across us, knowing we need her meat, & we’ll have no more of it.’ She added, ‘There’s a fuel crisis on, too. We have a good supply of coal but let our coke run low as it’s off ration & supposed to be plentiful and we’re out of it for some time.’
A meat shortage, a fuel crisis, a flu epidemic, a hastily conceived and overambitious rearmament programme having a sharp impact on the consumer: altogether, it was not a happy picture in early 1951. By March it was being reported that as many as 1,700 in a single day were making enquiries about how to emigrate to Canada. But Richard Dimbleby would have none of it. ‘I can only speak for myself,’ he declared in his staunchly patriotic column in the Sunday Chronicle. ‘Nothing on earth would ever persuade me to have my home anywhere but in England, where my ancestors have lived ever since they sacked and burned the farms of East Anglia fifteen hundred years ago.’19
About the same time, Mass-Observation put the question to the female members of its panel: ‘What are your feelings about housework?’ Predictably, there was no shortage of replies, from housewives of varying ages and varying degrees of contentment:
I think housework becomes infinitely easier with the right tools. I consider every housewife should be able to have a washing machine, a proper wringer, a vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator. Without these tools, a lot of the work is a drudgery and the result is either the woman doggedly keeps on at her work becoming a kind of martyred housewife, or she just skips the lot and a fusty dusty house results. (37)
I like Monday least as after a slight relaxation of work on Sunday I find it very hard to get going again on Monday. I dislike washing as I have such a heavy morning and get very tired through standing at the sink. I dislike having my hair damped by steam but refuse to wear any head-covering. Hate the wrinkled appearance of my hands on Monday and usually feel cold. (40)
I don’t kick against pricks that are unavoidable, but don’t pretend I find housework entrancing. (56 )
The job I like least is ‘washing the front’ which my mother-in-law insists ought to be done every week – and because I couldn’t sit back and see her doing it – I have more or less taken this on altogether – I must admit she does it occasionally if I let it go more than about 10 days. (25)
I have a strong sense of beauty and order, and rather enjoy housework. (59)
I think housework is an utter waste of time when there are so many more interesting things to be done. (27)
Whether she enjoyed it or loathed it, housework was now an inescapable part of life for the servantless and as yet relatively gadgetless average middle-class woman. ‘Such a programme for today!’ recorded an exhausted Judy Haines on the last Wednesday of March. ‘House-worked like a nigger all morning. Baked during afternoon. Really felt dazed by nightfall.’
Mass-Observation also asked its male panellists how they imagined women felt about housework. ‘Women usually really enjoy housework,’ replied an industrial chemist, drawing on his experience as an unmarried 28-year-old. ‘Those who hate housework are rare.’ A married civil servant, 37 and with two boys, was far less sanguine about his wife’s attitude: ‘I would indeed be a fool if I did not know that she gets fed up to the teeth with it at times living as we do in two rooms and a scullery with no bathroom.’ But according to a married police inspector, 48, ‘women are keenly jealous of the house – they regard it as their province and to trespass on the preserves is to risk wrath’. Another, higher-profile panellist, Ralph Wightman of Any Questions?, would have agreed. Asked during a programme from the Corn Exchange in Plymouth the previous autumn if it was still ‘a man’s world’, his answer was wholly unreconstructed:
I think that, generally speaking quite seriously, in this country, most woman’s work is at home – that’s a platitude I know but it is true, and they can make up their minds just how they do the work and when they do it – they usually do it in a most inefficient manner I might say. But – they’re the person who decides this is the day for the bedrooms and tomorrow is the day for the washing and next day for the ironing and they fix it and they do it. Whereas, most men, almost all of us, have got to do in our working life precisely what we’re told, and that is much less pleasant, much less independence – real independence, and after all, we do earn most of the money anyway, so why shouldn’t we have a little relaxation occasionally when we’re allowed to escape from this terrific dominance of the home. (LAUGHTER.)
A little deserved relaxation, then, for the menfolk – but most Saturday afternoons not for the long-suffering supporters of Accrington Stanley, who in March 1951 took their scarves, mufflers and rattles to Valley Parade and watched their team go down to a 0–7 defeat at the hands of Bradford City. Two injuries reduced the visitors – in what were still pre-substitute days – to nine men. The suffering was not yet over, and the Accrington Observer described the match’s aftermath:
The driver pulled his vehicle up, dashed round to the luggage compartment and dragged out the first-aid kit. Swabs were needed to staunch the flow of blood. A few minutes later, he did the same thing, this time because there was an inert passenger in need of revival to consciousness. From a nearby house, a kindly soul produced a cup of hot tea. An ambulance on its way from a battlefront? No, just Accrington Stanley on a routine journey home from yet another heartbreak match in this, the blackest season in the club’s history.20
The radio remained in the early 1950s a mass medium capable of commanding huge loyalty. ‘Listeners welcomed back the Bentley-Nichols-Edwards team with delight, and found the new script and situations as witty, lively and irresistibly amusing as ever,’ noted the BBC’s audience-research newsletter in November 1950, with the first episode of the new series of Take It From Here having been heard by 38 per cent of the adult population. Not long afterwards, a staggering 57 per cent listened to Variety Cavalcade, a star-packed programme from the London Palladium celebrating a century of British music hall; no fewer than one in three were listening to Educating Archie by the end of its first series; and on Christmas Day, after 62 per cent had heard the King’s broadcast at 3 p.m., ‘roughly two out of three listeners kept their sets on and nearly all of them heard Wilfred Pickles’ Christmas Party on the Light Programme’ – an eloquent tribute to the pulling power, and centrality in British popular culture, of the star of Have a Go!
There was also the immensely popular panel game Twenty Questions, each week featuring the Mystery Voice (‘and the next object is . . .’). Its regular chairman by early 1951 – by which time the programme was also running on Radio Luxembourg but with a rival line-up – was an irascible, highly knowledgeable former schoolmaster starting to make a name for himself. ‘I often wonder if Gilbert Harding could be as pompous & “condescending” as he sounds,’ reflected Nella Last one Monday evening in March. A fortnight later, she came back to the subject: ‘Gilbert Harding was in a less “pompous” mood – why, when I listen to that undoubtedly clever man, do I get the impression that he is a “prisoner” within himself – that he is shy, sensitive, e
ven in his most “cutting” moods? Odd!’21
Meanwhile, at 11.00 each weekday morning, Mrs Dale’s Diary was being listened to by some 13 per cent of adults. ‘The Dales are, without a doubt, accepted as typical of an ordinary, suburban, professional family – people who might easily be listeners’ neighbours,’ purred the BBC’s newsletter in October 1950. From the start of 1951, however, they had a rural rival. ‘What we need is a farming Dick Barton,’ a Lincolnshire farmer, Henry Burtt of Dowsby, had declared at a meeting in Birmingham in June 1948 of farmers and Ministry of Agriculture officials – a meeting convened by the producer of agricultural programmes for the BBC Midland Region, Godfrey Baseley, part of whose remit was to encourage small farmers to modernise their methods and thereby increase their output. Baseley took the remark to heart, and almost exactly two years later a pilot week of The Archers was successfully broadcast on the Midland Region. The aim, he explained in a memo soon afterwards, was to give an ‘accurate’ and ‘reassuring’ picture of country life in Ambridge, drawing ‘portraits of typical country people’ and ‘following them at work and at play and eavesdropping on the many problems of living that confront country folk in general’. Roughly 15 per cent of each programme would comprise farming advice and information, but there would be sufficient emphasis on entertainment to keep the attention of ‘the general listener, i.e. the townsman’.
Austerity Britain Page 71