by Andrew Marr
Some of the most eloquent cultural moments in the life of post-war Britain had religious themes, from the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, with its tapestries by Graham Sutherland, to the popularity of Benjamin Britten’s wartime choral work A Ceremony of Carols. Perhaps Britain’s best-loved serious painter was Stanley Spencer, who was turning out work in the forties and fifties based on his own idiosyncratic interpretations of biblical events – the Resurrection, Christ calling the Apostles, the Crucifixion. John Piper was famous for his watercolours and etchings of medieval churches; John Betjeman celebrated later, Victorian ones. Post-war Britain’s major poet, the American-born T.S. Eliot, was an outspoken adherent of the Church of England. His last major book of poetry, Four Quartets, is suffused with English religious atmosphere, while in his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral he addressed an iconic moment in English ecclesiastical history. He would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. C.S. Lewis had become a nationally known Christian broadcaster during the war, with his Screwtape Letters, and for children there was soon to be the religious allegory of the Narnia books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, appeared in 1950. It could fairly be said that in this period, there still existed an Anglican sensibility, a particularly English, sometimes grave, sometimes playful, Christianity, with its own art and thought. It may have been wispy and self-conscious but it was also alive and argumentative, as it is not today. It was of course a limited and elite movement. Already, saucy revelations in the Sunday papers were where most people turned when they thought of immorality, not to sermons.
Were the British of the forties any more moral, or at any rate any more law-abiding, than the modern British? This is one of the hardest questions to answer. Conventions and temptations were just so different. On the surface, it was certainly a more discreet, dignified and rule-bound society. Divorce might have been becoming more widespread, but it was still a matter for embarrassment, even shame. Back in the early thirties, the average number of divorce petitions filed was below 4,800 a year. During the war, it jumped to 16,000. By 1951, with easier divorce laws, it was more than 38,000. In the forties and fifties, it still carried a strong stigma, across classes and reaching to the highest. As late as 1955, when Princess Margaret wanted to marry Group Captain Peter Townshend, the innocent party in a divorce case, a Tory cabinet minister, Lord Salisbury, warned that he would have to resign from the government if it allowed such a flagrant breach of Anglican principles. Divorced men and women were not welcome at Court. Homosexuality was illegal and vigorously prosecuted. Pornography was, for most people, almost unknown – ‘dirty books’ were on sale in a very few bookshops but ‘smut’ was still considered something mostly available for foreigners.
The censorship of the theatre, dating back to Walpole’s time, was taken extremely seriously. Playwrights had to submit their plays to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office at St James’s Palace, which would strike out double entendre or vulgar language. John Osborne had a letter back about his play The Entertainer in March 1957, with sixteen alterations, such as ‘Page 6, alter “turds”. Page 9, alter “camp”…The little song entitled, “The old church bells won’t ring tonight ’cos the Vicar’s got the clappers”. Substitute: “The Vicar’s dropped a clanger”.’ Yet behind the firewall of censorship and law, there is plenty of evidence of a country just as sex-obsessed as it is now, and probably always was. The scatological outpouring in private letters and diaries is amazing, presumably the flip-side of public discretion. The war had involved years of disruption to family life, broken relationships, a lot of quiet domestic adultery, and a boom in homosexual activity, as tens of thousands of young, frustrated servicemen were let loose in darkened cities. One thing which would shock many people now, if they could be transported back, was the huge number of prostitutes working openly on the streets in the ‘red light’ areas of the cities, around Manchester city centre, Edgbaston in Birmingham and Edinburgh’s Leith Walk. In London, the so-called Hyde Park Rangers and Piccadilly Commandos were gangs of prostitutes working almost unmolested by the police and earning small fortunes from horny soldiers.
Street crime had boomed particularly in London and in the words of one of the capital’s historians by 1945 ‘the country was awash with guns, illegally sold by American servicemen for £25 for a handgun, or brought back by British servicemen from abroad’. Over the war years, though the population of London had dropped by some two million, the number of serious offences per head had doubled. The immediate post-war years saw real problems, partly because of the size of the black market, armed racketeers, and the continued presence of deserters, of whom many thousands were hiding out, including an estimated 19,000 from the US Army. Because of frustration at the slow pace of demobilization, desertions increased after hostilities ceased. Films of the time sometimes reveal a semi-anarchic wilderness territory of bombed-out homes and urban wasteland, which may be policed by gangs. Memoirs confirm that many children and adolescents, lacking parents or simply profiting from the shaky administration of a great city returning to life, more or less ran wild.
Yet to get the tone of the times right, it is important not to forget that, among the rebellions against rationing and official incompetence, Britain was basically law-abiding. In a country awash with cheap handguns, struggling with profound resentments about shortages and a thriving black market, and still containing many deserters on the run, by virtually every count available, serious crime then fell. The guns did not lead to spates of shootings. Croydon did not become Chicago. Armed crime in London involving guns fell from a high of forty-six incidents in 1947 to just four cases in 1954. The number of people sentenced to prison fell by 3,000 between 1948 and 1950. The murder rate fell. Indeed, overall serious crime fell by nearly 5 per cent per head of population in the five years after the war. One historian of British crime concludes: ‘Perhaps the most peaceful single year was 1951, with a low level of crime, especially violent crime, following a brief increase in bad behaviour following the war.’ Bearing out the tricksiness of all statistics, this year is cited by others as a post-war crime peak, yet the general picture holds up. People respected the police and came across serious crime rarely. The various scares about violent racketeers in London, or lawless youths, were mostly confined to the papers. Foreign observers talked about the orderly, calm, law-abiding nature of British society as something rare in Europe or around the world. All of this matters enormously to Britain’s self-image now, since commentators and politicians often point to the post-war era as a time of Edenic peace and order, far removed from the world of machine-gun-toting police and drug gangs. Why was Britain so well-mannered and lawful?
Some argue that tougher penalties are the most obvious reason. It is true that from 1946 until the year hanging ended, 1964 (though it was legally abolished two years later), some 200 murderers were executed. Other grim punishments, notably flogging, were on the wane; they were ordered infrequently in the fifties. The last judicial birching was approved by the Conservative Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, as late as 1962, though the practice continued in the Isle of Man and very occasionally in Scotland. Yet violent crime was on the increase again well before hanging was abolished. Its abolition cannot be the only reason. One obvious factor is that so many young men, the people who commit most crimes, were in the Armed Forces, latterly doing National Service. This did not simply take people off the streets. It provided discipline and the habit of obeying – and issuing – orders. Two generations of boys were marched off for short haircuts and taught to polish their shoes by fathers who had been in the services. Then there was the relative lack of opportunity. A society in which people barely have enough to eat and possess few movable goods is rather less prone to street crime than one in which every teenager totes an expensive mobile phone, and every urban street is lined with parked cars. Finally, not to be underestimated simply because it cannot be measured, there was the spirit of the times. The war had shaken everyone’s sense of security – not just serving
troops but the bombed and the evacuated and the bereaved as well. The Cold War would not diminish an underlying sense that life had become fragile. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that there was a profound post-war turn towards hearth and home and a yearning for security, order, predictability – in the street, in the neighbourhood, if it could not be there in the wider world.
These then, in all their variety, patriotism and hope, were the people whose fate was now in the hands of Clement Attlee and his ministers. We have looked at the difficulties facing the country and at the confused hopes of the new government. We know that the dream of a New Jerusalem, a socialist commonwealth, was never realized and that some historians see the 1945 government as a wasted chance. It is time now to look at what this government actually did.
15
What the Romans Did For Us
The post-war Labour government did the following things. It created the National Health Service. It brought in welfare payments and state insurance ‘from the cradle to the grave’. It nationalized the Bank of England, the coal industry, which was then responsible for 90 per cent of Britain’s energy needs, and eventually the iron and steel industry too. It withdrew from India. It demobilized much of the vast army, air force and navy that had been accumulated during the war. It directed armament factories back to peaceful purposes and built new homes, though not nearly enough. It oversaw a rationalization and shake-up in the school system, raising the leaving age to fifteen. It kept the people fed, though, as we have seen, not excitingly fed. It started to fight Communism in Korea and to develop the atomic bomb. It did these things against the background of the worst financial crisis that could be imagined, at a time when its own civil servants were drawing up plans for starvation rationing if the money ran out, and while meeting its obligations to the malnourished people of other countries, left bereft by war or crop failure. It harangued people to work harder and consume less. In its dying months it did its best to amuse and entertain them too, with the Festival of Britain. This combines to form the most dramatic tale in our peacetime history of a State organization doing things it actually meant to.
Without the war, clearly, there would have been no ‘Attlee government’ as we remember it. With the war, though, some major social reform programme became inevitable; wars shake up democracies violently, whether they win or lose. France and Italy saw a huge rise in Communist influence after the war. Britain did not. But had a post-war British government tried to shrug off the hopes for a brave new world shared by so many and encouraged by everyone from archbishops to newspaper editors, what damage would have been done to Britain’s political system? There could have been no return to the thirties. After the privately run chaos and underinvestment of pre-war Britain people from almost all parts of the political spectrum thought central planning essential. Churchill’s Tories would have done many of the things Labour did, just a little less so, and more slowly. By the time the old man returned to power again in 1951, he was promising to do more in some areas, such as housing. The historian of the Welfare State puts it like this: ‘A country which had covered large tracts of East Anglia in concrete to launch bomber fleets, and the south coast in Nissen huts to launch the largest invasion the world had ever seen, could hardly turn round to its citizenry and say it was unable to organise a national health service; that it couldn’t house its people; or that it would not invest in education.’ What was done after the war to remake Britain was not inevitable. There were lots of battles and individual decisions on the way. But some such quiet revolution, some big grab of state power, or extension of political will, was bound to have occurred.
16
Beveridge: Spin Doctor and Sage
If there is one man who deserves a place in the pantheon of reform, outside party politics, it is that cadaverous, white-haired, publicity-mad, kindly, harsh, determined and entirely impossible man, William Beveridge. He had left his wealthy upper-class circle to become a social worker in the East End of London, just like Clement Attlee. He then became a journalist and a civil servant before the First World War, a friend of intellectual socialists. He worked with the young Winston Churchill in the Liberal government, was one of the architects of rationing in 1916 and was later a Liberal MP. He knew Whitehall inside-out but left to become an academic, using the young Harold Wilson as his dogsbody. This was a hard life. Beveridge was fanatically hard-working, rising at six for a cold bath before spending the rest of his day icily wallowing in cold statistics, writing and dictating. When war came again, Beveridge decided that government could not properly function without him and pestered the Churchill team for a job. He was bitterly disappointed when Bevin, who disliked him intensely, finally shut him up with the offer of a review into the confusing array of sickness and disability schemes for workers. It was hardly glamorous or central to the war effort and Beveridge apparently wept tears of rage and frustration when he was told. He set to work, however, and quickly decided there could be no coherent system of work benefits without looking too at the plight of the old, women at home and children. Workers were not alone, self-sufficient. They had families. They aged. He would have to devise a system to include everyone, while keeping the incentive to work. There would have to be family allowances, and a National Health Service, but all this would be undermined if Britain returned to the era of mass unemployment; so the State would have to manage the economy to keep people in work. Giving Beveridge a limited remit and telling him to get on with it was like giving Leonardo da Vinci some paper and telling him to doodle away to pass the time.
Earlier we noted that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell was abroad in the England of the mid-forties. Beveridge was urged by his helper, soon to be his wife, Jessy Mair, to adopt the language of Cromwell too. Soon he was stomping around telling anyone who would listen that he intended to slay five giants – Want (he meant poverty), Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge was addicted to what a later Britain would call ‘spin’. He used his position as a well-known broadcaster, and his contacts with the press, to drip out advance hints of the great report he was preparing, which he clothed in millennial language. He was also lucky in his timing. After the bleakest of the war years, Britain’s fate was on the turn. There were, inevitably, plenty who were nervous or hostile. Leading industrialists protested that Britain was fighting Germany to keep the Gestapo out of our houses not to build a costly Welfare State. The Conservative Chancellor, Sir Kingsley Wood, briskly told Churchill that Beveridge’s plan would be unaffordable. Whitehall mandarins resented his egotism and self-promotion. But he had the wind at his back. Popular expectations were too high and memories of the thirties were too vivid for the white-haired giant-killer to be stopped.
Beveridge’s was a long, detailed, number-filled report, longer than this book, with no pictures and very few adjectives. Yet there were queues in London on the day of publication waiting to grab copies. It sold like no government report before, and very few since. Within a month, 100,000 copies had been bought; eventually six times as many were sold. It was distributed to British troops, snapped up in America, and dropped by Lancaster bombers over occupied Europe as propaganda – ‘Look, here’s the kind of thing a democratic society promises its people.’ A detailed analysis of the Beveridge Report was discovered in Hitler’s bunker at the end of the war, ruefully describing it as ‘superior to the current German social insurance in almost all points’.At home, unaware of the impact he was making in the unlikeliest places, Beveridge lectured. He wrote columns. He filled halls. He broadcast. A few months later the cautious Churchill acknowledged that, far from distracting attention from the war effort, the Beveridge Report was greatly boosting morale. He gave his first broadcast on domestic issues, accepting ‘a broadening field for state ownership and enterprise’ in health, welfare, housing and education, noting that Britain could not have ‘a band of drones in our midst’, whether aristocrats or pub-crawlers; and in a splendidly Churchillian twist announcing that ‘there is no finer investment fo
r any community than putting milk into babies.’