A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  During the war, men from the Caribbean began to arrive, serving with the British forces. There was a Jamaica Squadron and a Trinidad Squadron in the RAF and a West Indian Regiment in the British Army. Others came to work in factories, in the countryside and on radar stations. But once the war was over, most were sent straight home leaving an estimated permanent non-white population of about 30,000. It had been the 130,000 black American troops who made the most impact on British public opinion during the war. Despite official worries about ‘fraternization’ with coloured soldiers, they were widely welcomed and lionized. There are well-attested incidents of white GIs who tried to apply the American colour bar being mocked and challenged. After the war, almost unnoticed by the general public and passed in response to Canadian fears about the lack of free migration around the Empire, the 1948 British Nationality Act dramatically changed the scene. It declared that all subjects of the King had British citizenship. This gave some 800 million people around the world the right to enter the UK. Though it seems extraordinary now after so many decades of new restrictions on immigration, this was uncontroversial at the time for a simple reason – it was generally assumed that black and Asian subjects of the King would have no means or desire to travel to live in uncomfortable, crowded Britain. Travel remained expensive and slow. Why would they want to come, anyway? Until the fifties so few black or Asian people had settled in Britain that they were often treated as local celebrities and officially it was not even considered worth while trying to count their numbers.

  There were other immigrant communities. A Jewish presence had been important for a long time, in retailing, the food business and banking – everything from Marks & Spencer to Rothschild’s Bank. But in the five years before the war, some 60,000 more Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe arrived here, many of them highly qualified, helping transform the scientific, musical and intellectual life of forties Britain. When Hitler came to power in 1933 it was agreed at cabinet level to try ‘to secure for this country prominent Jews who were being expelled from Germany and who had achieved distinction’ in science, medicine, music and art. Beveridge himself helped set up an organization to help Jewish refugees, the Academic Assistance Council, which, using public donations, helped 2,600 intellectuals escape. No fewer than twenty of them later won Nobel prizes, fifty-four were elected Fellows of the Royal Society, and ten were knighted for their academic brilliance. In their invasion plans for 1940, the German SS reckoned the Jewish population of Britain to be above 300,000, and hugely influential.

  Then there were the Irish, a big group in British life after a century of steady immigration, the vast majority of it from the south. It continued through the war, despite government restrictions, as Irish people came over to fill the labour shortage left by mobilization. Ireland’s stony neutrality and her expression of sympathy at Hitler’s death at the end of the war, had made Eire very unpopular with the British. Popular prejudice against the Irish continued, as it always had, and would for a long time to come. Yet none of this seemed to affect immigration, which carried on at a great rate through the forties and fifties, running at between 30,000 and 60,000 during any given year. Whenever cabinet committees turned to the issue of migration, the Irish were excluded from debate because they were regarded as effectively indigenous. There were other more exotic groups. By the end of the war, Britain was home to 120,000 Poles who had fled the Soviets and Nazis, many of them then serving in the British forces, notably the RAF. Most chose to stay on and by the end of 1948, with the energetic help of government settlement officers, 65,000 had jobs, in everything from coal-mining to factory work. Similar tales can be told of Czechs and many other nationalities. All these, of course, were white.

  It would be wrong to portray Britain in the forties as relaxed about race. Despite the horror of the concentration camps, widely advertised in the immediate aftermath of the war, anti-Semitism was still present. The assumption that ‘they’ dodged queues or somehow got the best of scarce and rationed goods, erupts from diaries and letters of the time. After Jewish terrorist attacks on British servicemen in Palestine in 1947, there were anti-Jewish disturbances in several British cities, including attacks on shops and even the burning of a synagogue, mimicking the actions of Nazis in the thirties. More widely, trade unions were quick to express bitter hostility to outsiders coming to take British jobs – whether they be European Jews, Irish, Poles, Czechs or Maltese. The government itself spoke without self-consciousness or embarrassment about the central importance of ‘the British race’. The multilingual, multi-hued Britain of today, with its greengrocers selling baskets of yams and its scents of turmeric and incense, in which more than 90 per cent of us do not think you have to be white to be properly British, would have left a visitor from the immediate post-war years utterly astonished. Then, Jews and passing American servicemen apart, the composition of the country in 1945 was not much different from late medieval times.

  9

  Proper Drains and Class Distinction

  Patriotic pride cemented a sense of being one people, one race, with one common history and fate. But to be British in the forties was to be profoundly divided from many of your fellow subjects by class. By most estimates, a good 60 per cent of the nation was composed of the traditional working class – that is, they were factory workers, agricultural labourers, navvies on the roads, riveters, miners, fishermen, servants or laundrywomen, people in a thousand trades, using their muscles; and all their dependents. The workers were paid in cash, weekly – cheque-books were a sign of affluence. People did not move, much. War aside, most would spend all their lives in their home town or village, though the thirties had produced modest migrations such as from industrial Scotland and Wales to the English Home Counties. The sharp sense of class distinction came from where you lived, how you spoke; and it defined what entertainments you might enjoy. The war had softened class differences a little and produced the first rumblings of the coming cultural revolution. Men and women from widely different backgrounds found themselves jumbled together in the services. On the home front, middle-class women worked in factories, public schoolboys went down the mines and many working-class women had their first experiences of life beyond the sink and the street. In uniform or in factories, working-class or lower middle-class men could find themselves ordering former well-spoken toffs around. ‘Blimps’ – the older, more pompous upper-class officers – became a butt of popular humour, a symbol of dying old Britain.

  With skill shortages and a national drive for exports, wages rose after the war. The trade unions were powerful and self-confident, particularly when the new Labour government repealed the laws that had hampered them ever since the General Strike of 1926. Three years after the war, they achieved their highest ever level of support. More than 45 per cent of people who could theoretically belong to one, did so, and there were some 8.8 million union members. In other European countries at this time, trade unions were fiercely political, communist, socialist or Roman Catholic. In Britain, they were not. The Communist Party, deprived of any real part of parliamentary politics, spent much of its energy and money building support inside the unions, and was beginning to win elections for key posts, but in general British trade unionism remained more narrowly focused on the immediate cash-and-hours agenda of its members. This did not mean British trade unions were quiet. Because so many of their most experienced and older shop stewards and organizers had effectively gone to work for the government during the war, or had joined up to fight, a new generation of younger, more hot-headed shop stewards, men in their twenties or even teens, had taken control of many workplaces. The seeds of the great British trade union battles of later decades were sown and watered during the forties.

  The core of the old working class which had depended for jobs on coal, steel and heavy manufacturing would eventually have a grim time as these industries first struggled, and then failed, in the decades to come. But this was not obvious after the war. The shipyards of the Clyde, Belfast and the Ty
ne were hard at work, the coalfields were at full stretch, London was still an industrial city, and the car-making and light engineering areas of the West Midlands were on the edge of a time of unprecedented prosperity. We were a nation of brick terraces. It was not until the next two decades that many of the traditional working-class areas of British cities would be replaced by high-rise flats or sprawling new council estates. The first generation of working-class children to get to university was now at school, larger and healthier than their parents, enjoying the dental care and spectacles provided by the young National Health Service. But for the most part working-class life was remarkably similar to working-class life in the thirties. No televisions, cars, foreign holidays, fitted kitchens, foreign food, service sector jobs had yet impinged on most people’s lives. Politicians assumed most people would stay put and continue to do roughly the same sort of job as they had done before the war. Rent acts and planning directives were the tools of ministers who assumed that the future of industry would be like its past, only more so – more ships, more coal, more cars, more factories.

  The class who would do best out of the wartime changes was be the middle class, a fast growing minority. Government bureaucracy had grown hugely and would continue to do so. Labour’s Welfare State would require hundreds of thousands of new white-collar jobs, administering national insurance, teaching, running the health service. Even the Colonial Office vastly expanded its staff as the colonies disappeared, giving one of its officials, C. Northcote Parkinson, the idea for ‘Parkinson’s Law’ – that work expands to fill the time available. Studies of social mobility, such as the major one carried out in 1949, are notoriously crude and have to be taken with a pinch of salt. But they suggest that while working-class sons generally followed their fathers into similar jobs, there was much more variation among middle-class children. Labour might have intended to help the workers first, but education reform was helping more middle-class children get a good grammar school education. A steadily growing number stayed at school until fifteen, then eighteen.

  So, perceptibly, the old distinctions were softening. The culture was a little more democratic. Increasing numbers would make it to university too, an extra 30,000 a year by 1950. The accents of Birmingham and Wales, the West Country and Liverpool would challenge the earlier linguistic stamp of middle-class respectability. The culture of public radio would bring literature and music to much wider audiences; the post-war humour of Tommy Handley and Round the Horne would be as enjoyed by the suburbs as by the palaces. Churchill himself had told Harrow schoolboys that one effect of the war was to diminish class differences. Sounding almost like a New Labour politician, he said to them as early as 1940 that ‘the advantages and privileges that have hitherto been enjoyed by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many.’

  10

  The Old Order

  But not quite yet. The ruling class was still the ruling class. Despite the variety of the 1945 cabinet, Britain in the forties and fifties was a society run mostly by cliques and groups of friends who had first met at public schools and Oxbridge. Public school education remained the key for anyone hoping to make a career in the City, the Civil Service or the higher echelons of the Army. Schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester might educate only some 5 per cent of the population, but they still provided the majority of political leaders, including many of Labour’s post-war cabinet. Parliamentary exchanges of the period are full of in-jokes about who was a Wykehamist and who an Etonian. Briefly, it had seemed such schools would not even survive the war: boarding schools had been in enough of a financial crisis for some to face closure through bankruptcy. Churchill’s own Harrow was one, along with Marlborough and Lancing, though all struggled on. More generally there was a belief that public schools had contributed to failures of leadership in the thirties and right up to the early defeats of the war. When the Tory minister R.A. Butler took on the job of education reform during the war, he contemplated abolishing them and folding them all into a single state school system. Had that happened, post-war Britain would have been a very different country. But Butler, intimidated by Churchill, backed off. A watered-down scheme would have seen Eton and the rest obliged to take working-class and middle-class children, paid for by the local authorities, but this quickly fizzled out too. The public schools stayed. Attlee, devoted to his old school, had no appetite for abolition. Grammar schools were seen as a way of getting bright working-class or middle-class children to Oxbridge, and a few other universities, so that they could buttress the ruling cliques. One civil servant described the official view as being that children were divided into three kinds: ‘It was sort of Platonic. There were golden children, silver children and iron children.’

  The problem for the old ruling order was whether the arrival of a socialist government was a brief and unwelcome interruption, which could be sat out, or whether it was the beginning of a calm but implacable revolution. The immediate post-war period with its very high taxation was a final blow for many landowners. Great country houses like Knole and Stourhead had to be passed over to the National Trust. It was hardly a revolutionary seizure of estates, yet to some it felt that way. Tradition was being nationalized, with barely a thank-you. In 1947 the magazine Country Life protested bitterly that the aristocratic families had been responsible for civilization in Britain: ‘It has been one of the services of those currently termed the privileged class, to whom, with strange absence of elementary good manners, it is the fashion not to say so much as a thank you when appropriating that which they have contributed to England.’ Evelyn Waugh, an arriviste rather than a proper toff, sitting in his fine house in the Gloucestershire village of Stinchcombe, struggled with the dilemma. In November 1946 he considered fleeing England for Ireland (many richer people did leave Britain in the post-war years, though more often for Australia, Africa or America). Why go? Waugh asked himself. ‘The certainty that England as a great power is done for, that the loss of possessions [he is talking of the colonies], the claim of the English proletariat to be a privileged race, sloth and envy, must produce increasing poverty…this time the cutting down will start at the top until only a proletariat and a bureaucracy survive.’

  A day later, however, he was having second thoughts. ‘What is there to worry me here in Stinchcombe? I have a beautiful house furnished exactly to my taste; servants enough, wine in the cellar. The villagers are friendly and respectful; neighbours leave me alone. I send my children to the schools I please. Apart from taxation and rationing, government interference is negligible.’ Yet the world felt as if it was changing somehow. Why, he wonders, is he not at ease? Why does he smell ‘the reek of the Displaced Persons Camp’? Many more felt just the same; Noël Coward said immediately after Labour’s 1945 win, ‘I always felt that England would be bloody uncomfortable in the immediate post-war period, and it is now almost a certainty.’ These shivery intimations of change would have some substance, though it would happen more slowly and have little to do with Attlee or Bevan. The old British class system, though it retained a medieval, timeless air, much exploited by novelists, depended in practical terms on the Empire and a global authority Britain was just about to lose. ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ would soon become shorthand for the returnees from Malaya or Rhodesia. A pervasive air of grievance and abandonment would hang about the right of British politics for decades.

  Meanwhile, old society events like the ‘Varsity’ rugby match, the Boat Race, the Henley Regatta and Ascot, quickly returned after the war and indeed reached the height of their popularity. Young Conservative dances were where the better-off went to find partners. The most famous actors and actresses were able to carry on a lavish lifestyle, hidden from the taxman. London clubland carried on almost as in the twenties. The capital’s grandest restaurants, some which are still going, such as the Savoy Grill and the Ivy, were again crowded with peers, theatrical impresarios, exiled royalty and visiting American movie stars. In the upper-class diaries of the day there are complaints ab
out a rising tide of ‘common’ behaviour, the end of good taste and the regrettable influence of Americans and Jews.

  Under Attlee, Britain remained a country of private clubs and cliques, ancient or ancient-seeming privileges, rituals and hierarchies. In the workplace, there was a return to something like the relationships of pre-war times, with employers’ organizations assuming their old authority and influence, at least some of the time, in Whitehall. Inside the new nationalized industries the same sort of people continued to manage and the same ‘us and them’ relationships reasserted themselves remarkably easily. In the City, venerable, commanding merchant bankers with famous names would be treated like little gods; stiff collars, top hats and the uniforms of the medieval livery companies were still seen, even among the grey ruins of post-Blitz London; younger bankers and accountants deferred utterly to their elders. Newspaper owners would sweep up to their offices in chauffeured Rolls-Royce cars and be met by saluting doormen. The Times was soon full of advertisements for maids and other servants. Lessons in speaking ‘the King’s English’ were given to aspiring actors and broadcasters; much debate was had about the proper way to pour tea, refer to the lavatory and lay the table. Physicians in hospitals swept into the wards, followed by trains of awed, indeed frightened, junior doctors. At Oxford colleges, formal dinners were compulsory, as was full academic dress, and the tenured professors hobbled round their quads as if little had changed since Edwardian times. All of this was considered somehow the essence of Britain, or at least of England.