A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Diaries and letters of the time show a country utterly obsessed by food. There had been a general assumption that as soon as the war was over pre-war variety and spice would return to the shops. Instead rations were cut and the disappointment was bitter. One response was the rise in popularity of that wartime character, the spiv. The later BBC television comedy Dad’s Army featured in the fictitious platoon, one Joe Walker, played by James Beck (who was even wilder than his character, and died at forty-four from alcohol poisoning). Walker is a double-breasted-suit-wearing, pencil-moustached, perky villain with a heart of gold, forever upending the moral pretensions of his betters by slipping them an illicit bottle of whisky, a carton of cigarettes or a pair of stockings for the missus. Walker is the service economy in guerrilla form. He is a criminal but one whom everyone relies on. After the war the real-life spivs, the traders and dealers on street corners or in cafes, came out of the shadows and became a recognized part of life under Labour.

  Moral confusion about people taking the law into their own hands features in two of the hugely popular Ealing comedies, both first shown in 1949. In Passport to Pimlico, the citizens of an area around a bombsite find out they legally belong not to the United Kingdom but to the Duchy of Burgundy. As Burgundians, they are free from the rationing and petty restrictions hemming in other Londoners. Almost as soon as they have finished celebrating their freedom, they are swamped by a plague of spivs, jostling, threatening and causing a breakdown of law and order. They represent the suppressed greed and wild consumerism that socialists feared was always present under the surface – as indeed it was. When the British State responds by cutting off Pimlico with barbed wire, the Burgundians hold out, in a comic mimicry of the country’s stand in 1940. The people of London take their side and throw them food to keep the ‘Burgundians’ from having to surrender. It seems clear that this was directly copied from scenes in the real-life squatting revolt eighteen months earlier. In a comic conclusion the tensions are resolved, just as in a Shakespeare comedy. The rebels reach an amicable agreement with the authorities and return to the ration-card Britain where everything is fair and ordered, if somewhat frustrating.

  Whisky Galore!, shown a few months after Passport to Pimlico, comes down on the other side of the argument. It relates what happens when a cargo ship full of whisky, tellingly called the SS Politician, runs aground off the Hebridean island of Todday. The story is fictional, taken from a comic novel, but was based on real wartime events; the actual ship was called the SS Cabinet Minister. The islanders, like the rest of Britain, are whisky-starved and opportunistic. The film tells the story of how the island community steals and hides huge quantities of whisky which had been intended for North America, foiling the authorities in the shape of the English Home Guard commander Captain Waggett (played by Basil Radford; a precursor to Arthur Lowe in Dad’s Army). In the film, the puritanical British State is subverted by a tightly knit and determined island community who end with a great dance of celebration and liberation. In Todday, unlike Pimlico, the people’s yearning for good things triumphs. In real life, the rather heroic struggle of a lone exciseman to recover the whisky divided the islanders, led to convictions for theft and produced a poisoned atmosphere between families which lasted for many years. The fantasy, however, is remembered and the truth forgotten.

  One can see the tension between the Burgundians returning to ration books, and the islanders of Todday beating the authorities to keep the stolen whisky, as a filmic version of the political tension between wartime-style controls championed by the Labour government; and the frustrated hostility exemplified by pro-free market Tories. Eventually the controls would be partly dismantled, rationing would end and the first great consumer boom would begin, more or less in parallel with Labour’s loss of power in 1950-1. In the meantime, however, a surprising degree of petty criminality was tolerated in an otherwise law-abiding country, not just on the part of spivs but the shopkeepers bending rules to help old customers, or the people who filched a little from work, or the ordinary men in pubs who would buy an extra pair of stockings for their wives. This criminality, however, would not have existed without the privations of the time, and the impertinence of officialdom. A novelist looking back a decade later caught the mood:

  Ludicrous penalties were imposed on farmers who had not kept strictly to the letter of licences to slaughter pigs; in one case, the permitted building was used, the authorised butcher was employed, but the job had to be done the day before it was permitted; in another case, the butcher and the timing coincided, but the pig met its end in the wrong building. Never had a bureaucracy so flaunted its total failure to comprehend the spirit of the times, which was low and resentful…So really, almost everyone participated; it was a sort of pale, hangdog spivery in back kitchens and the rear of shops.

  There were other ways of rebelling. The British Housewives’ League, formed in 1945 by a clergyman’s wife to campaign against rude shopkeepers and the amount of time spent queuing, helped remove the hapless food minister Ben Smith over the withdrawal of powdered egg. Other foods brought into the country and foisted on consumers were regarded as disgusting. Horses were butchered and sold, sometimes merely as ‘steak’. Whalemeat was bought from South Africa, both in huge slabs and in tins, described as ‘rich and tasty, just like beefsteak’. It was relatively popular for a short while, but not long. Magnus Pyke, later a popular television scientist, explained that though it tasted fine to the first bite of a drooling mouth, ‘as you went on biting, the taste of steak was quickly overcome by a strong flavour of – cod-liver oil’. Then there was snoek, a ferocious tropical fish supposed to be able to hiss like a snake and bark like a dog.

  One of the odder vignettes of wartime Britain has the young Barbara Castle, then Betts, working for the fish division of the Ministry of Food. She was quartered in a grand London hotel, the Carlton, which boasted large bathrooms and generously sized baths. These were filled with fish, to be observed for experimental purposes. Barbara Castle, in short, lived with a snoek. Her report on its behaviour must have been favourable because in October 1947 the government began to buy millions of tins of snoek from South Africa. Protein was in short supply. South Africa would take pounds, not the scarce dollars. So ministers tried to persuade the British that, in salads, pasties, sandwiches, or even as ‘snoek piquante’ with spring onions, vinegar and syrup, the powdery, bland fish was really quite tasty. The country begged to differ and mocked it mercilessly, buying very little. Snoek became a great joke in the newspapers and in Parliament. Eventually it was withdrawn and sold off for almost nothing as catfood.

  The Conservatives would later put out pamphlets showing pictures of a horse, a whale and a reindeer to show ‘the wide choice of food you have under the Socialists’. Labour tried hard to keep the country decently fed during a grim few years, when much of the world was at least as hungry. But between the black market organized by the spivs, which spread very widely across Britain in the forties; the British Housewives’ League, whose rhetoric would be remembered by a young Conservative student called Margaret Thatcher; and the spontaneous boycott of snoek, the public showed that it was fed up to the back teeth with rationing. Fair or not, as soon as they could, Labour from 1948 and then Tory ministers began to remove the restrictions and restore something like a market in food. American aid began to flow again and spiritually the mildly anarchic island of Todday trumped goody Pimlico.

  22

  Rebellion: a Bit of Skirt

  It took a long time for British clothes to brighten up. Well into the sixties, children were still wearing the baggy grey shorts and unravelling home-made jumpers of the forties, men were still dressing in heavily built grey suits for social occasions, wearing macs and hats on their days out, and women were in housecoats and hairnets. But the forties did see one celebrated revolution, which showed just how frustrated women had become at the dowdy, dreary life they had suffered. It began in Paris, with the arrival of a new fashion house, created by a young
designer who was in love with the belle époque France of his childhood, the pre-First World War country of swirling skirts, elegance and luxury. His name was Christian Dior and his revolution was christened the New Look. One of the British women who attended the unveiling in 1947 said she heard for the first time in her life ‘the sound of a petticoat’ and realized that at long last the war was really over.

  Dior’s revolution was a return to billowing, deliberately unpractical skirts and dresses, what the magazine Harper’s Bazaar described as ‘a slight, slender bodice narrowing into a tiny wasp waist, below which the skirt bursts into fullness like a flower. Every line is rounded…’ The long skirts and padded bosoms, the pleats and extravagance, burst like a firework display over a British womanhood described later as in a ‘grey state…weary, dispirited, cramped and cross’. It was a direct challenge to the austerity culture of the government and quickly caused a genuine political battle. The British Guild of Creative Designers complained that they did not have the materials and could not give way to French irresponsibility. Labour MPs busily threw themselves into the fight against frippery. The beefy and redoubtable Mrs Bessie Braddock denounced the New Look as the ‘ridiculous whim of idle people’. Mabel Ridealgh MP said it was being foisted on women and promised that housewives would not buy it. All this padding and artificiality was bad because it made for ‘over-sexiness’, she added; the New Look was turning women into caged birds and removing their new freedom.

  Yet from the young princesses of the Royal Family downwards, women were ignoring the political orders and doing everything they could to alter, buy or borrow for the Dior look. Ruth Adam, who worked in the Ministry of Information during the war and later became a novelist, argued that a generation of girls who had been ordered to work in factories, on pain of prison if they refused, did not see it as a liberation:

  To them, Labour MPs who lectured them about wearing ‘sensible’ clothing, suitable for productive work, were the same breed as the women officers who had routed them out of doorways where they were having a goodnight kiss, and sent them back to camp; and as the forewoman who had shouted at them for spending too long in the Ladies while Russia was waiting for aeroplane-parts. Now they did not have to listen to lectures about hard work and freedom any more, but could think about being feminine and glamorous.

  There was a pent-up yearning for the better, more colourful life that middle-class people, at least, could remember from before the war – everyone from their twenties onwards would have had a reasonably vivid recollection of mid-thirties consumerism. In a world in which men and women were still wearing roughly fitted and standardized demob suits, handed out with hats, ties and shoes as you left the forces, clothing was a powerful symbol of prosperity postponed.

  23

  Knobbly Knees and Other Fun

  In and out of their homes, what were the British of the forties doing for fun? They were certainly not watching television, something owned by less than 0.2 per cent of the adult population in 1947 and by only 4 per cent in 1950. They were not travelling abroad for their holidays. For one thing, people had less time on holiday, and less money to spend too. The Holidays with Pay Act, passed shortly before the war, had hugely expanded the number of people with guaranteed paid holidays but a fortnight was more common than a month. In 1947, in the days before jet travel and with the amount of money one could take severely restricted, just over 3 per cent of people holidayed abroad, the vast majority being wealthy and going no further afield than the Mediterranean or northern France. They did not drive around the British countryside, either, or ‘go motoring’ in the pre-war phrase; petrol rationing had seen to that. But in that same year, slightly over half the British did take some kind of holiday. Many took the train to one of the traditional Victorian-era seaside resorts, which were soon bursting with customers. Others went for cycling and camping holidays – the roads were by modern standards almost empty of traffic. Yet more would take the charabanc or train to one of the new holiday camps, run by such early entrepreneurs of leisure as Billy Butlin.

  The South African-born Butlin had come from a broken family and, on his mother’s side, fairground barkers. She gave him his first taste of the showman’s life with her gingerbread stall which she took around West Country market towns. After a much-interrupted education and a short spell as a commercial artist in Canada, followed by service in the war, Billy Butlin began a hoopla stall in the twenties. Year by year, he slowly built up a business in amusement parks – with haunted houses, helter-skelters, hoopla and merry-go-rounds. His big breakthrough was getting the European licence for selling the new Dodgem cars. Then, having spotted the miserable time spent by many families in seaside landladies’ accommodation, he opened his first camp at Skegness in Lincolnshire in 1936.

  Holiday camps of different kinds, often run for employees of a particular company, had existed before. But Butlin’s Skegness was a hugely ambitious undertaking, with a swimming pool, theatre, cinema, many amusements and – crucially – crèche facilities so that parents could spend time together without their children. A second camp followed at Clacton two years later and after handing over facilities to the armed forces, he ended the war with five large holiday camps just at the opportune moment. A tough little man, who had carried a cutthroat razor in his top pocket while building his fairground and exhibition business before the war, and who boasted to friends that his aims were ‘money, power and women’, Butlin had a shrewd understanding of what war-weary people wanted. He offered colour, fun, warm cabins, surprisingly good food and almost constant activities, from dancing to the famous ‘knobbly knees’ and ‘glamorous granny’ competitions.

  Butlin, who was a millionaire within two years of the war ending and who, after various financial crises, would be knighted and receive the Queen at one of his camps, was targeting the middle classes as much as the better-off workers. Italian opera, Shakespearean productions, radio stars, politicians, the odd archbishop and sporting heroes were all invited to the camps – and came. There was nothing ‘naff’ about the camps, certainly in the forties and fifties, their heyday; indeed, for a lot of people they were pricey. After the wartime experiences of everyone mucking in together, the morning-to-bedtime activities provided by the Redcoats, with their relentless jollity, seems to have been welcomed. Butlin had his fingers burned with an ill-timed attempt to expand into the American market with a Caribbean camp in 1948, and the mass overseas tourism which began in the sixties would end the glory days of his camps, and their rivals. But for millions of British people they would remain a synonym for summer holiday well into the age of Benidorm. And, if cheap air travel falls victim to oil price rises or worries about global warming, the age of the domestic holiday camp may yet return.

  Outside the annual holiday, the traditional spectator sports made a swift post-war return. Football had been badly hit during the war years, not just because so many players were away in the forces, leaving veterans the field to themselves, but because the English Football League had been suspended, and the country simply divided into north and south. New rules meant that League players had numbered shirts, could earn up to £12 a week, and that games could be played until they produced a result (though in 1946 this meant Doncaster Rovers and Stockport County playing into the darkness after 203 minutes without a goal, there being no floodlighting then). The great soccer teams were soon back in action, to capacity crowds.

  Stanley Matthews, the Stoke barber’s son who was a pre-war legend, was back amazing crowds for Blackpool after the war. In 1953, when Matthews was the ripe old age of thirty-eight, some 10 million people watched him in the first televised Cup Final. By 1948-9 there were more than 40 million attendances at football matches and a general assumption that British football was the finest there was, something seemingly confirmed the previous May when Britain had played a team grandly if inaccurately named the Rest of the World (they comprised Danes, Swedes, a Frenchman, Italian, Swiss, Czech, Belgian, Dutchman and Irishman) and thrashed them 6
-1. That illusion would be dispelled before long, but in other ways too this was a golden age of football. The stands were open and smelly, the crowds unprotected and the greatest stars of the post-war era still to come. But football was relatively uncorrupt, was still essentially about local teams supported in their immediate area, and was not dirty on the pitch: throughout his long career Matthews, for instance, was never cautioned, never booked.

  Another famous footballer of the time was Arsenal’s Denis Compton. It is just that he was still more famous for cricket, which became massively popular again after the war. Some three million people watched the Tests against South Africa in 1947 and Compton’s performance then and in the following years produced a rush of English pride and mass enthusiasm. The cricket writer Neville Cardus found him the image of sanity and health after the war: ‘There was no rationing in an innings by Compton.’ In cricket as in football, many of the players were the stars of pre-war days who had served as PT instructors or otherwise kept their hand in during hostilities; but with the Yorkshire batsman Len Hutton also back in legendary form at the Oval, cricket achieved a level of national symbolism that it has never reached since, not even in the heyday of Botham or the summer of 2005. Again, as with football, the stars of post-war cricket could not expect to become rich on the proceeds. Hutton, a builder’s son who first made his name beating teams of public schoolboys on behalf of London council schools, became England’s first professional captain of the century in 1952 and the dishevelled Compton, whose father had worked in a chemist’s shop, first came into decent money as the face of Brylcreem adverts.