After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  By the close of the nineteenth century, there were many good schools in England, but as well as imparting knowledge they were reinforcing the fairly recently devised social hierarchies. 1945 would have been an obvious moment to abolish private education altogether, and to force the British to draw, for their Civil Service, their better universities, their professions and skilled jobs, from as wide a pool as possible, regardless of wealth or levels of gentility. When it came to it, however, the likes of C. R. Attlee (Haileybury), Sir Stafford Cripps (Winchester), Viscount Stansgate (Westminster) and Hugh Dalton (Eton) funked the abolition of their old schools.

  The Fleming Committee,7 which sat from 1942 to 1944, and was set up to review the position of independent schools and direct grant schools,* recommended that after the war, society should no longer tolerate the social divisiveness of the old public school system. A minimum of 25 per cent public schoolboys, in the first instance, should be chosen from state primary schools. This proposal was dropped in the Conservative Rab Butler’s Education Act of 1944, which merely increased the opportunity for clever boys and girls to go to grammar schools. Butler had been in favour, personally, of abolishing the fee-paying element of direct grant schools, and he was an agnostic about the question of whether the private schools should be abolished.8 Butler, however, was a Man of Munich, a compromiser. Half his name was given to the phenomenon of consensus politics which governed Britain until the 1970s – Butskellism (an amalgam of the names Butler and Hugh Gaitskell, Social Democrat leader of the Labour party after Attlee). His autobiography was entitled The Art of the Possible. He had to be able to sell the generous, and on the whole liberal, flavour of his educational reforms to the diehards on the Tory backbenches and to the House of Lords. Moreover, since the funding for education passed largely from central government to local government, the overall question of whether powerful private schools should continue to exercise their overwhelming bias in favour of particular groups and classes was simply allowed to drop.

  So, most astoundingly, it may be said with hindsight, was much of an attempt to counteract the essentially aristocratic method by which Britain was governed. Just before he became Home Secretary and when he was still the president of the Board of Trade, in 1910, Winston Churchill had said: ‘The time has come for the total abolition of the House of Lords … Many Conservatives have frankly abandoned the hereditary principle. Scarcely a voice in any party is raised on behalf of the existing institution. We as a Liberal Party stand outside this spontaneous repudiation of hereditary and aristocratic privilege.’9

  As leader of the Opposition in the postwar period, however, Churchill took a rather different view. The question of the abolition of the House of Lords might have been dear to the heart of a few firebrands on the left of the Labour party. All the Tory Opposition found themselves opposing, however, was some very mild tinkering with the Parliament Act, shortening the time in which the House of Lords could delay legislation which was passed to it for approval from the Commons. The Lords were careful not to antagonize the new Labour government, the 5th Marquess of Salisbury (leader of the Tories in the Upper House) taking the view that it was not peers’ job to stifle the mandate of an elected government.10

  Churchill, with his love of building up the Labour party as a swarm of anti-democratic demons, represented the new legislation as ‘class tyranny’. What Labour wanted, he claimed, was ‘virtually single Chamber Government’.11 He now defended the Lords, which in 1910 he had wanted abolished, on democratic grounds. The constitutional aim was ‘that the persistent resolve of the people shall prevail without throwing the community into convulsion and disorder by rash or violent, irreparable action and to restrain and prevent a group or sect or faction assuming dictatorial power’.12

  In fact, House of Lords reform did not loom large in the 1945 Parliament because the Attlee government had so much else on its agenda. The only reason the Labour government wished to shorten the veto was in order to speed through iron and steel nationalization, which the Tories in the Lords were questioning. It was very much as an expedient parliamentary measure that this check on the Lords’ power was proposed and not per se as an attack on the hereditary principle, such as the Liberals had made in 1909–10. By leaving alone the private schools, and the House of Lords, the Attlee government revealed that it was not attempting to turn Britain into one of the northern European socialist states such as Finland or Sweden. Its social engineering took a back place behind its belief in centralized, government-owned industries – coal, steel, iron – government-owned railways, and government-sponsored welfare, especially in the field of pensions, and with the creation of the first National Health Service in the world where treatment was free at the point of entry.

  One of the first acts of nationalization was more in the nature of a symbolic act than anything else: the Bank of England. ‘Make me Chancellor of the Exchequer and give me a good Labour majority in Parliament and I will undertake the nationalization of the Bank of England over a dinner party,’ said Hugh Dalton. In fact he did not even need a dinner party. He ‘nationalized’ the Bank over a cup of tea with his friend, the governor of the Bank of England, Lord Catto. All that happened was that the Court of the Bank was reduced in number, and restricted to technical experts. The superfluous merchant bankers resigned. Nicholas Davenport, who knew the City well in those days, wrote in his memoirs: ‘What Dalton did was really a non-event. First, he asked … Lord Catto of Morgan Grenfell to stay on because he was such a nice friendly chap who had risen from the ranks. Then he reduced the Court from twenty-four to sixteen and took power to appoint only four of them each year. He retained the prominent directors who had been associated with the worst disasters of Montagu Norman’ – that is, the deflationist governor who had presided over the financial disasters of the between-war years.13

  Times were hard in these austere war years. Men were coming back from the armed services to a bomb-scarred, bankrupted country. Housing was desperately short. ‘We DEMAND a Home, not the WORKHOUSE. EX-SERVICEMEN demand Justice for our wives and kids’ read the notice outside one Islington squat in a council-owned building. Tiny little prefabricated houses – prefabs – sprang up all over the place as a temporary solution to the problem; but it was only temporary, and the Conservative government, when it was returned in 1951, was faced with a massive rebuilding programme.

  There was a run on the pound from almost the moment Labour took office, and the financial situation in the exchequer was dire, with tax income at an all-time low, and no help from the Americans at first on offer to a socialist party. Barbara Castle was a new Labour MP in 1945 – later a minister in the Labour governments of 1966 onwards. She recalled that the attitude of the Truman administration to Britain changed automatically with the election. ‘Even ships which were crossing the Atlantic changed their nature’ as they became conveyors of goods which had to be paid for on docking rather than of a contribution from one ally to another.14

  The British economy had never faced graver difficulties. There were accumulated foreign debts of £4,000 million. Foreign assets were hugely reduced. Exports had shrunk to about 40 per cent of their 1939 levels. There was a calamitous shortage of raw materials.15 A low point was reached in 1947 when, on top of food shortages (even bread was rationed), fuel shortages and money shortage, the worst winter on record immobilized the country under mounds of snow and ice. ‘Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic rails,’ as Anthony Powell powerfully evoked that time.16 Hugh Dalton, the somewhat clerical (his father had been a canon of Windsor) Chancellor of the Exchequer, leaked the contents of an emergency budget in November 1947 to a lobby journalist. In the twenty-first
century, British lobby journalists are told the contents of the chancellors’ budgets before they are announced to the Commons, but in those days the House of Commons was still considered to have a serious political function, and Dalton honourably resigned. He was replaced as Chancellor by Sir Stafford Cripps, an austere bespectacled Wykehamist, rumoured to subsist upon mustard and cress grown from the blotting paper on his desk. His nickname was Austerity Cripps. Briefly a member of the war cabinet, when he had been a persistent critic of Churchill and his policies, his own Puritanism and zest for self-denial matched the necessary leanness of the times. Major W. H. Lewis, the brother of C. S. Lewis, the Oxford don and literary scholar, gloomily told his diary in November 1947: ‘Potatoes are put “on rations” on a scale of 3 lbs per week for the bourgeois. And so the last “filler” food disappears from the diet, and the days of real hunger come upon us. It’s extraordinary how one is conditioned by a secure past: even now I can’t grasp the fact that I, WHL, will go to bed hungry and get up hungry; these, I say, are things that happen to nations one reads about in the papers, not to me.’17

  Cripps was a much more effective Chancellor than Dalton, rising betimes and getting through the equivalent of a day’s work before most of his Treasury colleagues had had their breakfast. Thanks largely to American aid in the Marshall Plan from 1948 onwards, and to his encouragement of collaboration between the unions, government and management in the newly nationalized industry, the postwar economy began to recover. It exacted a very great personal cost. He resigned through ill health on 20 October 1950, and six months later, three days short of his sixty-third birthday, Cripps was dead.

  Cripps’s economic and political ideas were left-wing, in so far as they assumed the desirability of state ownership of the transport system and the coal, iron and steel industries. But Ruskin’s Unto This Last more than Marx’s Capital was the inspiration for his belief in a mixed economy. Even more Victorian was the philanthropic inspiration of the welfare state, which was the Attlee government’s lasting legacy to the British people. The guiding spirit and founding father of the welfare state was not a socialist but William Beveridge, who was born in Rangpur, Bengal, on 5 March 1879, the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service. After Charterhouse and Balliol, he worked at Toynbee Hall, the Oxford settlement in the East End of London, and throughout his life, as a civil servant, academic (he was for a while Master of University College, Oxford) and politician (briefly Liberal MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed, 1944–5), he was a classic Victorian liberal who believed not in a nanny state nor in a dependency culture, but in self-betterment. He never liked the phrase welfare state. His persistent belief was that society existed for the individual, and it was this belief which inspired his famous Report of 1944 in which he set out a programme to wage war on the five giants who stood across the path of national reconstruction: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.

  With the advent of Margaret Thatcher on to the political scene in Britain in the late 1970s it became fashionable to belittle the achievements of the Attlee government and to question the very notion of welfare. Churchill’s words of 1909 were forgotten – ‘I do not agree with those who say that every man must look after himself, and that intervention by the state … will be fatal to his self-reliance, his foresight and his thrift … It is a mistake to suppose that thrift is caused only by fear: it springs from hope as well as fear. Where there is no hope, there will be no thrift’.

  Beveridge, and those whom he inspired, who included not merely members of the Labour party, but all who wished to build a decent society after the war, can hardly be blamed for any of the problems facing an under-funded, badly managed welfare service in the Britain of the twenty-first century. What the Report, and the Labour government that had the courage to put it into practice, brought to pass was the chance of a decent schooling for every child; the chance of decent housing for all – it was no longer left to the likes of Basil Jellicoe to build habitable dwellings for the less well-off; the chance of full employment – through those Keynesian methods encouraged by Oswald Mosley in 1931 and finally adopted by his old party in 1945; and the provision of health care, which included dental care, for all, regardless of their income. What Beveridge was recommending, and what Attlee’s government was putting into practice, was a programme almost identical to that of Mosley’s New Party in 1931. In 1931, it had been regarded as ‘extreme’. By 1945, it was seen as no more than the people of Britain, after six years of war, and a much longer history of being shafted by the capitalist system, deserved.

  Any who now feel called to mock the Beveridge Plan, or its extraordinarily faithful execution in the period of 1945–50, should ask themselves – would they rather live in the slums of one of the big British cities before or after the Second World War? Would they rather be a poor person in 1933 or in 1953? Would they rather be sick in 1933 or 1953? Would they rather be an old person in the workhouses which still survived until the Second World War, or living on the, albeit modest, pension provided by the Labour government of 1945?

  It was not merely the health service of which the Attlee government was rightly proud, it was the whole achievement. In economic circumstances of unprecedented exigency, these so-easily mockable men in their three-piece suits, with their pipes and their trilby hats, did the decent thing. It would have been intolerable to leave things as they had been before the war, with children suffering from rickets in mushroom-infested slum-dwellings, with the pensionless old dying destitute, with health care available only to those who could afford to pay for it. Of course, decent-minded doctors in general practice had always cared for patients regardless of whether they could pay or not. But the National Health Service was one of the most stupendous British inventions. As soon as it was started, it was in a state of ‘crisis’, and it has been in a state of crisis ever since. It could have been better run from the beginning. No doubt wiseacres know ways of making it better. The simple and magnificent thing about it cannot be diminished. You no longer needed, before you had your appendix removed, or your teeth fixed, or your weak heart, kidney or stomach attended to, to produce a chequebook. It was the great Ruskinian corrective to the Darwinian relentlessness of capitalist necessity.

  Undoubtedly the boldest cabinet appointment of Attlee’s was to make Aneurin Bevan (‘Nye’) the Minister of Health. He was far to the left of the party; indeed, during the 1930s he had advocated the Popular Front, an alliance of left-wing parties with the Communists, and an ‘English Revolution’. Not that there was anything English about this brilliant Welshman. Born in 1897 in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, he was the son and grandson of coal miners. He himself went down the pits at the age of thirteen. He spoke in childhood with a stammer, and his vast reading, like his later legendary eloquence, was the combination of energetic self-improvement and inborn genius. From the beginnings of his political self-education, he was a reader of, and believer in, Marx. In 1931 he had been attracted to Mosley’s New Party, but he never really wavered in his belief that in practical terms, the British Labour party was the only institution which could bring to pass the socialist society in which he believed. Throughout the war he was a vociferous critic of Churchill, who repaid the compliment by describing him as ‘a squalid nuisance’.18

  The importance of personal charm in history is sometimes forgotten. Chaim Weizmann had it in abundance, and this largely explains Arthur Balfour’s 1917 Declaration. Churchill had it, and could woo the most unlikely political opponents. When Nye Bevan arrived at the Ministry of Health, Sir William Douglas, a natural Conservative, had been appointed his Permanent Secretary. Douglas made it clear to friends that he did not intend to stay long. Bevan, he said, was ‘a terrible fellow. I’ll never forgive him for all those attacks on Churchill during the war. I made it clear that I would carry on only for three months until they got someone else.’ A few weeks later, a colleague asked Douglas how he was managing under Bevan. ‘What are you driving at?’ Douglas asked. ‘He’s the best Minister I ever worked for. I
’ve made it clear that while Bevan’s there, I’ll stay.’19

  Of all the professions, the British medical profession was perhaps the most conservative in all senses. On 26 July 1945, while the election results were being announced, the British Medical Association was holding its annual meeting in its headquarters in Tavistock Square. This was a building where clerical staff, as late as the 1930s, were instructed that they must vacate the lift, rather than share it with the frock-coated, top-hatted consultants who had arrived from Harley Street to conduct business. Deference towards doctors in the great hospitals rivalled the reverence shown towards the higher clergy in Rome. When the BMA heard that Beveridge had lost his parliamentary seat in the election, they interrupted their meeting and burst into a loud round of applause. One Harley Street consultant said: ‘I have spent a lot of time seeing doctors with bleeding duodenal ulcers caused by worry about being under the State.’20