Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  In its reaction to this almost wholly unanticipated turn of events, the Tory-supporting press was largely disinclined to add to the government’s troubles. The Telegraph argued that there had been ‘a touch of the prima donna’ about Thorneycroft’s wish ‘to dictate Government policy’, that under Macmillan there would be ‘no taking of the hand from the anti-inflationary plough’, and that overall the episode was ‘no economic Munich’; the FT criticised Thorneycroft’s stance as unduly ‘rigid’; for the Express, he was a ‘stiff-necked’ finance minister ‘carrying fiscal purity to excessive lengths’; and for ‘Candidus’ (on behalf of the Sketch), not only was there ‘not the least suggestion that the Government is wavering in its resolve to strengthen the value of the pound’, but the crux of the ‘disagreement’ was ‘whether rigid doctrine should prevail over common sense and flexibility’. With the Mail and the Spectator sitting it out, and the Sunday Times slightly pro-Macmillan (‘the Government is not like a business’), support for Thorneycroft came only from The Economist and The Times. Even then, the former’s backing was qualified – describing Thorneycroft as two-thirds ‘a man of rare resolution’, but one-third ‘of peculiar punctilio’ – so it was left to ‘The Thunderer’ (under the moralising editorship of Sir William Haley) to provide the heavy guns. ‘Flinching’ was the unambiguous title of its leader on the 7th, beginning: ‘So Mr Macmillan has not, in the end, supported his courageous Chancellor of the Exchequer. All those who have felt that the battle for Britain’s economic security is still in the balance must have hoped that that support would be forthcoming.’ Next day saw a follow-up editorial on ‘A Principle’, that of keeping a lid on government expenditure: ‘If, as we believe, a principle is at stake, the smallness of the amount involved becomes an argument for strict observance of the principle, not an argument that it does not really matter anyway.’8

  Elsewhere, the provincial press was more instinctively inclined than the nationals to support the resigning trio – they ‘have set an example in resolute adherence to the principle of an all-out economy drive and a standstill in Government expenditure which wholly commends itself to all who are honestly realistic in regard to the future’, acclaimed the Kent & Sussex Courier – but there was still a widespread reluctance to follow those instincts through, especially if it meant rocking the Tory boat. ‘To insist upon drastic Governmental economies, even to the extent of striking at the structure of the social services which Conservatives and Socialists alike have helped to build up, might seem an heroic policy, well attuned to the necessities of the times,’ declared the Yorkshire Post. ‘But,’ it went on less than heroically, ‘would it serve the national interest if it set the trades union movement by the ears?’

  One commentator had no doubts about the merits of Thorneycroft’s case or its importance in the big post-war picture. This was Harold Wincott, editor of the Investors Chronicle and contributor each Tuesday to the FT, with a defiantly homely, non-Oxbridge column that enjoyed a considerable following in the City and even beyond. ‘I have yet to discover what the modern Conservative really believes in,’ he wrote on the 14th.

  At least, stupid as I am, I have yet to discover that he believes in the things I expect him to believe in as a member of the party which is in opposition to Socialism. I expect the Socialists to introduce Excess Profits Taxes, to break records in the number of council houses they build, to perpetuate a profits tax which discriminates against distributed profits, to do nothing to foster the property and share-owning democracy which they know will destroy them if it really gets rolling, to go on depreciating the currency. I don’t expect Conservatives to do these things.

  Wincott then applauded Thorneycroft for having publicly thrown overboard at least ‘one aspect of the Keynesian doctrine’, namely that ‘internal policies take precedence over the external value of the currency’. After a reference to ‘the realities of our position in 1958’, he concluded: ‘In the ultimate resort, if Mr Amory is not to be as expendable as Mr Thorneycroft was, it is the attitude of mind in the Conservative Party which has got to change. For over six years now, that attitude has been the “Dear-Mother-I-am-going-to-save-7s 6d-but-not-this-week” attitude. It still is. But the supply of weeks is running out.’9

  From the other end of the political spectrum, the New Statesman had little sympathy for what it called ‘The Silliest Chancellor’, but did foresee that he would receive significant rank-and-file Tory support, given that ‘the political mood of the suburban middle-class Tory, who forms the backbone of the local Associations, is a characteristic expression of social and economic insecurity: angry, reckless and greedy’. One provincial middle-class Tory sympathiser, Kenneth Preston in Keighley, was certainly on Thorneycroft’s side. ‘A new Chancellor has been appointed,’ he noted on the 7th, ‘and presumably now all these wage claims that have been refused will be granted. Politics are a sad business.’ When Gallup in due course produced its opinion-poll findings, they showed that 42 per cent of all voters sided with Thorneycroft, 20 per cent with Macmillan, and the rest a mixture of ‘neither’ and ‘undecided’. As for specifically Tory voters, 36 per cent plumped for Macmillan, compared to 33 per cent for Thorneycroft. Yet among those same voters, confronted by the proposition that government expenditure, including defence and social services, should be cut back in order to fulfil the government’s first duty of fighting inflation and preserving the value of the pound, 69 per cent agreed and only 13 per cent disagreed.10 How to explain the difference between the two Tory sets of figures? Perhaps it was a combination of personal faith in Macmillan, tribal loyalty to the party leadership and a certain innate reluctance to think things through.

  An important subset of Tory support was broadly in Thorneycroft’s camp. Oscar Hobson, doyen of City journalists, early on detected in the Square Mile ‘very strong support for, and sympathy with’ the former Chancellor, while soon afterwards the Spectator noted that the resignations had been regarded in the City as ‘a loss of nerve by the Government at a particularly vital moment’, as the ‘disinflationary policies were just beginning to be successful’. Even so, the probability was that many practical City men did not quite see it as a black-and-white issue. Rab Butler, temporarily in charge of the government, reported to his absent master what a leading broker had told him: ‘I would like to see the Government cutting every penny off expenditure. But if it is a matter of political judgement I would prefer to trust Macmillan rather than Thorneycroft.’11 And of course, peculiarly important in the City, there was also the unquantifiable tribal factor.

  Predictably, the Tory MPs closed ranks. So far from ‘Flinching’, one outraged backbencher, Robert Cary, wrote to The Times, ‘the Prime Minister has faced courageously the issue of not only maintaining the stability of sterling, but, equally important, of sustaining social peace at home’. The same day his letter appeared, the 8th, the Daily Express published its poll of 58 Tory MPs, revealing only 6 open (if unnamed) supporters of Thorneycroft, 30 supporters of Macmillan and the rest of the Cabinet, 11 hedgers and another 11 refusing to comment. By the following week, the Tory chief whip Edward Heath was able to report reassuringly to Macmillan in Pakistan: ‘Our members now seem to have settled down again and are waiting until the House resumes before passing final judgement. The party as a whole remains loyal to the Government but is still somewhat perplexed about the reasons for the resignations.’ Parliament was due to reassemble on the 21st, and ‘from all the signs’, as Mollie Panter-Downes had already perceptively noted, ‘Mr Thorneycroft will not receive much support in public in the House of Commons, whatever it may say in private’. She was in a crowded press gallery for the politically crucial economic debate on the 23rd, which, prior to a vote of confidence on the government’s declared policy of keeping the pound strong and controlling inflation, included Thorneycroft’s resignation speech:

  The Government, displaying some anxiety over possible abstentions on the Tory benches when it came time to vote, had reportedly drummed up Conservative ab
sentees who were on holiday or away convalescing, and had got them to come along – sunburnt or wan or in any shape at all – to make the result look really heartening for home-and-abroad consumption. As it turned out, the Government need hardly have bothered, since there were no recriminations from Mr Thorneycroft, and the Party, cheering him to the echo, voted solid [i.e. for the government], in a glow of enthusiasm for the principles on which he had apparently insisted to the point of resignation. If this sounds bewildering, that was just about the way it seemed.

  Or as Panter-Downes also put it, this ‘demonstration of the gentlemanly oddities of the British political system’ was ‘enough to baffle foreign observers and make lots of Britons, too, feel somewhat confused as to who was hitting whom among all the congratulatory Conservative handshakes’.

  In fact, the content of Thorneycroft’s gravely delivered, 11-minute speech – a ‘personal triumph’, according to the FT – was far from anodyne. Since the war, he asserted, Britain had sought to combine a full-scale welfare state with a large defence programme, not to mention discharging its onerous responsibilities to the sterling area. He went on to offer his analysis of the consequences and implications of this not ignoble attempt: ‘It has meant that for twelve years we have slithered from one crisis to another. Sometimes it has been a balance of payments crisis and sometimes of exchange but always it has been a crisis. It has meant the pound sinking from 20s to 12s. It is a picture of a nation in full retreat from its responsibilities. It is the road to ruin.’ And he went on: ‘The simple truth is that we have been spending more money than we should . . . It is not the sluice gate which is at fault. It is the plain fact that the water is coming over the top of the dam.’ His conclusion was stirring: ‘I believe there is an England that would prefer to face these facts and make the necessary decisions now. I believe that living within our resources is neither unfair nor unjust, nor perhaps, in the long run, even unpopular.’12

  In the fullness of time, Thorneycroft and his co-resigners would be portrayed as proto-Thatcherite martyrs. And so in an obvious sense they were – despite the temptation to exaggerate the Macmillan of the mid-1950s (whether at No. 11 or No. 10) as a Keynesian spendthrift, and despite Edward Heath’s characteristic insistence three decades later, in a radio interview about the episode, that ‘the only way in which it was historic was that it showed that some people who wanted to get rid of Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister failed to do so’. Yet in truth, by 1958 itself, not only had the small-state free-marketeers barely joined battle, let alone started to win it, but the assumptions of a rising generation of ‘activators’ were almost wholly pointing the other way. ‘In economics he was, like the rest of our generation, under the influence of the Keynesian revolution,’ William Rees-Mogg would recall about a fellow bright young graduate on the FT’s staff, Nigel Lawson. ‘We looked on the neo-classical Treasury mandarins as dangerous old fuddy-duddies.’

  Even so, the small but purposeful organisation that would do much to lay the intellectual ground for Thatcherism was by now in existence: the Institute of Economic Affairs, under the leadership of the extrovert Ralph Harris and the more cerebral Arthur Seldon, both from working-class backgrounds. The latter’s first publication for the IEA, Pensions in a Free Society, had recently appeared. ‘The philosophy underlying this paper is that most of us are now adult enough to be left, or to be helped, to live our own lives according to our own lights,’ Seldon wrote. ‘The transition from dependence to independence must be gradual; that is all the more reason for beginning soon.’13 As long as collective memories remained strong of the slump of the 1930s, and of the appalling human misery that had accompanied it, it was a message that would struggle to win either emotional support or political traction.

  6

  A Worried Song

  On Saturday, 11 January, five days after Thorneycroft’s resignation, the BBC experimented by televising two race meetings, at Newbury and Haydock Park, on the same afternoon. Most viewers thought it ‘a very good idea’, saving ‘a lot of boring twaddle about the horses that are to appear in the next race’, but 11 per cent found it ‘unsettling’ and ‘hard to keep up with’. That evening Florence Turtle went to the Wimbledon Theatre to see Elsie and Doris Waters in Cinderella – ‘it was good fun & especially for the many children’ – while the Youngs and the Willmotts travelled to Little Cox Pond Farm, outside Hemel Hempstead. ‘We dined in the usual baronial Fienburgh manner,’ recorded Peter Willmott’s wife Phyllis, by now keeping a regular diary. Their host Wilfred Fienburgh was 38, a Labour backbencher, intelligent, amusing, somewhat louche, with ‘good looks and big brown eyes’ that (recalled Denis Healey) ‘often led him astray’. He told his guests ‘the Parliamentary gossip: that Macmillan’s youngest daughter is really Robert Boothby’s; that Princess Margaret still carries a torch for Peter Townsend; that the Cabinet want Elizabeth to have another child; that Philip has a Wren officer for a mistress’. The guests stayed on after dinner. ‘Michael [Young] is deaf to the sound and the pull of modern, popular music,’ continued Phyllis. ‘He looked almost uncomfortable as we listened to Wilf’s records. Disconcerted, unsure.’ The Youngs left at about midnight. ‘The rest of us went on rousting until 2 a.m. We played records and ended up dancing and jiving. Wilfred pretends to be very up to date on it all. He probably is more than we are. I can’t help feeling that it is more dignified to sit back and watch the youngsters caper.’1

  Next day another perceptive woman living in north London, Jill Craigie, had a question or two for the film producer Michael Balcon. ‘Can you honestly say that any of our directors gets under the skins of their women characters?’ she asked him. ‘Has your wife or daughter said anything to you about British films – I mean in the last six or seven years – “that is me, that is how I would have felt under those circumstances”?’ Judy Haines in Chingford was more concerned about her daughters’ moral and educational well-being. ‘I suggested they both pay as much attention to “Children’s Newspaper” as to “School Friend” and “Girl”,’ she wrote on the 16th. ‘Pamela said oh she most certainly did read C.N.; she knows all about Tommy Steele. I roared. She meant to be funny.’ As it happened, the first issue of Bunty was just hitting the newsagents (‘Ladybird Ring Free Inside!’ announced the front page), with Roxy shortly on the way for Steele fans (‘Tommy’s Lucky Little Guitar Brought Marcie Luck In Love’). But arguably the most signal publishing event of early 1958 was the coming of Woman’s Realm, launched by Odhams in February with a blizzard of advertising, including a four-page inset in Radio Times. ‘On this, our birthday, we greet Her Gracious Majesty, the Queen, and with her all our readers,’ began the editor’s message in the first issue. ‘We promise to serve them both loyally, and with all our hearts.’ And she went on:

  Our country today is literally a woman’s realm – ruled over by our young and beautiful sovereign and containing in itself those other realms in which all women are supreme.

  In the home and in the heart of her husband and her family, every woman finds happiness and fulfilment, as well as duty. This need never be a narrow domain, bounded though it often is by kitchen, nursery and household chores. Indeed, if she chooses to make it so, it can be the widest and most wonderful and the most rewarding realm in the whole world.

  Items on later pages included Susan King’s ‘Favourite Family Puddings’ (cherry apple flan, golden peach tart, magic mousse, topsy-turvy pineapple, chocolate chiffon, butterscotch pie), a pull-out booklet of ‘NEW knitting patterns’, a special offer for 2/6 of ‘Four Lovely Lipsticks for You!’, a report called ‘Can a husband want too much love?’ by a founder of the Marriage Guidance Council, stories with titles like ‘The Waiting Game’ – and, almost throughout, a relentless domestic-cum-family focus. The editor was Joyce Ward, and she had a conscious aim, brilliantly realised, of seeking to increase the enjoyment of home life for women who did not go out to work and were often rather older than the readers of the two market leaders, Woman and Woman’s Own. ‘From th
e very first issue the magazine “went like a bomb” and has achieved considerable popularity in the North of England,’ noted the historian of women’s magazines Cynthia White a decade later. ‘Judging by its correspondence, it draws the bulk of its readers from amongst home-bound housewives, as well as attracting a large number of lonely women in bedsitters.’2

  One elderly woman living alone in a bedsitter was Gladys Langford. ‘Depression deepening,’ she wrote on the very Tuesday that the first Woman’s Realm came out. ‘Conversation nil.’ By this time there was compelling testimony available in Peter Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People, the offshoot of Young and Willmott’s Family and Kinship that was likewise a study of Bethnal Green and also widely reviewed. ‘Those who are afraid of an isolated old age will find no consolation in these pages,’ noted an already apprehensive Kingsley Amis. But although Townsend pointed to serious deficiencies in provision for the elderly, it was not (with perhaps the exception of pensions) an area high on the political agenda. This same year in Glasgow, in a chronic ward of what had been a Poor Law hospital, the future geriatrician Bernard Isaacs encountered an utterly grim, twilight world:

  The dayroom was not a large room, perhaps six metres square. Its main item of furniture was a great grimy black stove, which stood in the centre of the room. It emitted very little heat, but evil-smelling wisps of smoke escaped from cracks and seams in its structure, blackened the walls and ceiling, and set the inhabitants of the room coughing and spluttering.

  Bunched around this stove, sitting on rickety wooden kitchen chairs, were some thirty or forty old men of terrifying appearance. Their countenances expressed a kind of dying rage, a wrath that had been replaced by despair, now become lifeless, unmoving, as though carved out of cold, grey stone.