A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  ROBOT, which was never revealed at the time, caused a rare row over matters of high principle inside the government and was eventually scuppered by the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and by Churchill’s own growing unease about its domestic implications. It was the kind of scheme which might have been pushed through by a determined, vigorous Prime Minister armed with a mandate for change but was too much for an old man elected on a blandly consensual ticket. And it was the only example of such radical thinking for years to come, at least at this level of government. For the most part, this was a government which ran on domestic autopilot. Above all, in the eyes of later critics, it failed to take on rising trade union power. The unions had swollen in numbers to record levels of membership. Their leaders tended to be working-class men who had left school in their teens to cut coal, drive lorries or load ships before becoming full-time organizers. In the fifties, they still had personal memories of the General Strike of 1926. Bitterness about the Depression had been partly assuaged after Labour repealed anti-union legislation, giving them powerful immunities in the case of strike action.

  These national leaders, men such as Arthur Deakin, Sam Watson and Bill Carron, tended to be patriotic and socially conservative, ready to back the Bomb and Nato, and aligned against the left in Labour Party confrontations. They were well able to do deals with middle-of-the-road Tory ministers. More were Catholics than were Communists. But their greatest card was the economy. Very high rates of employment, high demand from customers starved of goods, and relatively high corporate profits meant that there was an insatiable demand for skilled labour. It was easy for firms to pass on higher costs caused by generous wage settlements. And in terms of days lost to strikes, Britain’s record was not bad in the fifties, better than many economies which were growing faster. Butler at the Treasury confessed that he had no wages policy, only ‘Walter’s friendship with trade union leaders’ and when Monckton and Churchill did a deal to stop a bus-drivers’ Christmas strike because it was too ‘disturbing’, the Prime Minister phoned Butler late at night to tell him the good news. On what terms had he settled, the Chancellor nervously asked. Churchill replied, ‘Theirs, old cock! We did not like to keep you up.’

  Why fight the unions? It was a horribly difficult task, anyway. In a statist economy, ministers were abnormally close to the power of the public sector unions. By later standards, an astonishing number of industrial workers were employed by the State – some 1.7 million people in transport, the mines and the power industry alone. Again and again, from the railways to the power stations, from bus workers to coalminers, to engineering, Monckton and his successors bought them off. Ministers knew perfectly well what they were doing. In his diary for June 1955, for instance, Macmillan, when Chancellor, reflected on the settlement of a railway strike which had done ‘much harm’ to the economy. He comforted himself with the thought that the men got little more than they could have had earlier which ‘may have a deflationary effect and do something to stop the see-saw of wages and prices which has begun to show itself in the last year or two’. By 1958, as Prime Minister, he steeled himself to hold out against just the kind of transport strike that Churchill would have settled with a phone call. Yet Macmillan too never quite took it seriously and anyway by then the unions were changing in ways that made it harder to cope with them, not easier.

  Built up over decades by amalgamations and local deals, they were sprawling baggy monsters which bore little relation to organization by plant or industry. A single factory might have a maze of competing and mutually suspicious unions operating inside it. This led to the growth in power of the shop stewards, often younger and more militant people who had filled the power gap during the war years when their elders were away. They could get deals for the people around them which were better than national agreements. By the mid-fifties there were scores of thousands of them. It was ruefully noted that Britain now had more shop stewards than soldiers. Wildcat strikes were more common than full-scale national disputes and they caused more disruption and uncertainty. Meanwhile as the old guard died off more left-wing leaders were quietly moving up the union hierarchy. A good example was Frank Cousins, a former miner and truck-driver from Nottinghamshire who was running the road hauliers in Churchill’s day and who became leader of the Transport & General Workers’ Union in the year of Suez when more than half a million T&G men voted for him. He was Macmillan’s antagonist in 1958 and became a major headache for successive Conservative governments, leading strikes in the car industry, among busmen and elsewhere before being brought into the 1964 Labour cabinet by Harold Wilson. For a time he was the most famous, or infamous of the Brothers; but there were plenty of Cousins.

  If strikes were one small cloud on the edge of the sunny skies of the Tory years, inflation was another. It was always there in the fifties, getting worse as the decade continued, but not yet quite a crisis, although with so many older people living off annuities and savings, it began eating into the lives of many middle-class families. The problem was simple to describe, hard to sort, particularly after the rejection of radical measures such as ROBOT. The country was exporting all it could but its appetite for manufactured imports was insatiable. Britain no longer had enough overseas investments and was not earning enough through producing well-made, competitively priced goods, in order to earn the living its people now thought they deserved. In other times the gap had been easily closed by ‘invisibles’ – earnings from banking, insurance and shipping, where Britain remained a world leader. It might have done so in the fifties and sixties too, except that Britain was spending such an historically vast amount of money on defence in peacetime, and spending that money abroad. In effect, the weaker British economy was subsidizing the fast-growing West German one because of the huge expenditure on the British Army of the Rhine.

  The entirely predictable result of the balance of payments gap was that the pound was under constant pressure. There were periodic devaluations which damaged the reputation of the politicians in charge at the time – though the 1949 Labour devaluation is widely credited with kick-starting the Tory good times which followed. Trying to maintain British power through the sterling area (not just most of the Old Commonwealth, except Canada, but other countries including most of Scandinavia and traditional trading partners such as Portugal) meant that defending the value of the pound was an issue inflamed by pride and political sensitivity. In the Tory years it was another problem postponed. Defend the pound and Britain’s global self-image or let it fall and help Britain’s exporters? ‘Stop-go’ saw sudden tightenings of fiscal policy, then a stab on the accelerator, as government tried to break into a new era of growth, before slamming on the brakes to deal with the resulting surge in inflation. Until the post-war Bretton Woods system broke down in 1971 there would be regular arguments about devaluation. For politicians at the time, it was like trying to solve a puzzle with one too many parts.

  31

  The Purge

  It is 24 March 1954, late in the afternoon outside Winchester Castle. The great hall of the medieval building, with its famous fake of Arthur’s Round Table – created in the 1300s and painted for Henry VIII – is now empty. It has served duty all day as a courtroom. Now guilty verdicts have been passed and long since, the prison sentences meted out. But still the prisoners have been kept in the small whitewashed cells under the castle, an elderly Rolls-Royce waiting to take them to jail. The trial that had just finished made front-page headlines for days across Britain, and there were fears of a minor riot when the guilty men were led outside. They included a young peer of the realm, Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, known as Lord Montagu of Beaulieu; a Daily Mail journalist called Peter Wilde-blood; and a gentleman farmer, Major Michael Pitt-Rivers. Montagu had just been sentenced to twelve months in prison and the other two, eighteen months. Their crime had been conspiring to induce two RAF men to commit indecent acts – in other words, they were homosexuals.

  There was a great purge of homosexuals goin
g on in the Britain of the fifties, whipped up by the newspapers and by a clique of politicians and officials. The press had been full of salacious if untrue stories of wild orgies fuelled by champagne, the corruption of boy scouts and, perhaps worse than all this, of men who had associated with their social inferiors. So there was, perhaps, some reason to worry that when the three men were led away there would be angry attacks by the good burghers and women of Winchester. And indeed there were such scenes. But the attacks, the hammering of umbrellas, yelling, hissing and shaking of fists, was directed at the car taking away the prosecution witnesses. When eventually Montagu, Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers were seen by the women who had waited so long, the mood was rather different. As Wildeblood himself wrote later: ‘It was some moments before I realised they were not shouting insults, but words of encouragement. They tried to pat us on the back and told us to “keep smiling”, and when the doors were shut they went on talking through the windows and gave the thumbs-up sign and clapped their hands.’ Much later, when Wildeblood was finally released from prison, he found his neighbours and colleagues just as supportive. The English are often unexpected.

  Homosexual acts between men had long been illegal, but so long as they happened discreetly and in private, and did not involve minors, they had been relatively rarely prosecuted. The war, as we have seen, saw an increase in homosexual activity. After it, however, the official mood changed dramatically. In the last full year before the war there had been 320 prosecutions for ‘gross indecency’, a common way of describing homosexual behaviour. By 1952 the number had risen to 1,626. The prosecutions for attempted sodomy or indecent assault were up from 822 to over 3,000. If these still seem relatively small numbers, the ripples of fear and intimidation spread far further, and in general the number of homosexual offences known to the police had risen from 1938 to 1955 by 850 per cent. A small number of men were responsible. The crackdown had started under Herbert Morrison. But the toughest years were under the Conservative politicians of the fifties. The purge was led by the former Nuremberg interrogator of Nazi leaders, Churchill’s Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. With him was the Director of Public prosecutions, Theobald Mathew, who would often attend court to watch the ‘buggers’ be sentenced, as well as Sir John Nott-Bower, a Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police determined to rip the cover off London’s ‘filth spots’. They were supported by a press which ran articles on the secret world of mincing pansies, or explained to stout-hearted readers ‘how to spot a homo’. There were special drives to root out buggery in the Army and worried Whitehall inquiries into alleged lesbian conspiracies in the RAF. Lesbianism was not, in itself, a crime, allegedly because Queen Victoria had refused to believe it existed, but was an offence in the armed services.

  Attacking homosexuals helped sell papers and certainly played to the prejudices of many politicians and clergymen but there was more to it than that. The early fifties was also the time of maximum fear about Communism, subversion and spying. Not without reason. The atom bomb spy Klaus Fachs had caused appalling damage to British intelligence by the time he was exposed in 1950. In 1951 two of the famous KGB spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had defected to the Soviet Union. Though a proper version of their story would not break publicly until 1955, the British government was under American pressure to show that it was tough on subversive networks. This was not formally discussed at home but friendly overseas journalists were briefed. In October 1953, the Sydney Daily Telegraph reported that Cmdr E.A. Cole of Scotland Yard had spent three months in Washington consulting with the FBI after ‘strong United States advice to Britain to weed out homosexuals as hopeless security risks, from important government jobs’. With the arrival of Nott-Bower as the new Commissioner of Police ‘the plan was extended as a war on all vice…’ So moralism and national security worries intertwined. The homosexual, so the thinking went, had to live a double life. He was open to blackmail. He moved in mysterious circles. He was morally weak. The homosexual was therefore by definition a security risk. Burgess and Blunt had indeed lived secret sexual lives and the habits of essential deception, the feeling of belonging to a hidden and important circle, connected seamlessly to their lives as spies. Nor was the blackmail argument ridiculous. A few years after the Montagu case, John Vassall, a homosexual clerk who worked at the Admiralty and had been photographed in Moscow by the KGB at a gay sex party, was uncovered as a spy. Vassall was a conspicuous consumer, living far beyond his means, yet no one had asked the obvious questions about where his money was coming from. Again, there was much speculation about a wider homosexual and traitorous network, this time involving ministers too.

  The gap in official logic was that homosexual men were open to blackmail and had to live a secret life precisely because of the law that was now being so vigorously and aggressively enforced. Some men were self-confident enough to survive, the Labour MP Tom Driberg for one, who used the Commons toilets to proposition an impressive array of fellow politicians as well as parliamentary staff, and Macmillan’s colleague, the lover of his wife, Lord Boothby. But others, including the Conservative MP Ian Harvey, convicted of an offence with a soldier in Hyde Park, and the actor John Gielgud, arrested in Chelsea in 1953, were not so lucky. There was a very extensive and semi-open gay world in theatrical circles – Alec Guinness had been fined for importuning in 1946, for instance, but had escaped press attention by giving the false name Herbert Pocket. Other celebrities of the time such as Noël Coward and the impresario Binkie Beaumont hardly bothered to hide their sexuality. But the wave of prosecutions caused terror among those living outside the charmed circle of theatrical and political power.

  Montagu had fallen into the middle of the police operation first suggested by Washington. A premier peer of the realm, he was about as well connected as it was possible to be. In his time with the Grenadier Guards, he had served in Palestine during the worst of the Jewish terrorist attacks, and had an informal supper with the King, Queen and future Queen Elizabeth. In the advertising world, he had helped launch the patriotic new comic, The Eagle – the idea of a north country vicar called Marcus Morris who himself, said Montagu later, had ‘a distinctly unclerical sexual appetite, as he adored showgirls’. The peer would go on to become famous for his national motor museum at Beaulieu, help found English Heritage and marry twice. But he was bisexual, something he had suspected at Eton and was confirmed in the Guards. At one party in London, the aristocratic officers were entertained by a young naval rating doing a striptease who would later become a national treasure as the jazz musician George Melly. Yet Montagu always insisted that he had made no improper advances to two boy scouts, the reason for his arrest. Having been acquitted then, he was drawn into the later Wildeblood case. The prosecution stooped to forging an entry in his passport to try to discredit an alibi, used illegal tapping of phones, entered and searched private houses without warrants, and put appalling pressure on two RAF men to inform against their ‘social superiors’, in order to avoid many years of imprisonment for themselves. The witnesses, as they later admitted, had been carefully coached in their stories.

  Peter Wildeblood’s unusual response to the prosecution was to declare openly and unashamedly that he was a homosexual or, in the language of the day, an ‘invert’; and had a right to be treated with respect. He declined to apologize. His language was very far from the gay liberation rhetoric of modern times but it was clear and dignified: ‘I am no more proud of my condition than I would be of having a glass eye or a hare-lip. On the other hand, I am no more ashamed of it than I would be of being colour-blind or of writing with my left hand.’ He pointed out that Lord Montagu had done patriotic service in the Grenadier Guards and that Montagu’s co-accused cousin, Pitt-Rivers, had served bravely in the war, while Wildeblood himself, though he turned out to be a terrible pilot, had served with the RAF as a meteorologist in Africa. These were all, apart from their sexuality, entirely normal members of the patriotic, upper-middle-class Establishment, about as different from t
he Cambridge spies in their views as it would be possible to be. And, of course, since homosexuality is spread throughout society, some of the Establishment was gay, too. Lord Wolfenden’s famous committee, formed in 1954 to consider the law on homosexuality, was headed by a former public school headmaster and university vice-chancellor, and included Tory politicians, a senior official in the Girl Guides, a judge, and so on. When Wolfenden later discovered that his own son was gay he wrote asking him to keep out of his way and ‘to wear rather less make-up’. The committee, however, took evidence from Wildeblood among many others and after three years of private hearings in the Home Office, duly recommended in 1957 a change in the law, legalizing private homosexual activity between consenting adults aged over twenty-one.

  By then the country’s mood seemed to have changed. There was a feeling that the tactics used against Montagu and the others were unfair and underhand. The hostility to government interference and meddling, which had contributed to the fall of Attlee’s Labour administration, was beginning to stretch to private matters. When Wilde-blood was released from prison, he found his working-class neighbours in Islington to be cheerily friendly. When Montagu was released from Wakefield prison, where his fellow inmates had included Fuchs, he got a similar reception, though it was not universal. At lunch, in the fashionable Mirabelle restaurant in London’s West End, he recalled ‘one or two of the neighbouring tables disapproved. The atmosphere became unpleasant and remarks were made which were obviously meant to be overheard with intent to wound.’ At this point, however, the then Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, who was also lunching there, intervened. ‘He could see perfectly well what was going on. After a while, he laid down his napkin and crossed the room to our table. “How nice to see you back,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook with surprise and gratitude. The action silenced the surrounding hostility.’ There was continued hostility to homosexuals then and there is today, but the so-called permissive society of the sixties was already being forged by public reaction in the second half of the Tory fifties to cases such as these. For now, Parliament disagreed. In the first parliamentary debates on homosexual law reform, the Home Secretary, Maxwell-Fyfe, said he did not think the country would wear such a change. Had he been present in the Mirabelle restaurant, or had he stood a few years earlier outside Winchester Castle he might have realized he was already out of date.