This was also the summer of the great London bus strike, with Frank Cousins, left-wing leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, as central protagonist.14 ‘People hearing Cousins in action for the first time are usually struck by the remarkable way he combines a donnish clarity of analysis with the fervour of a demagogue,’ noted an Observer profile earlier in the year of this 53-year-old miner’s son who had become General Secretary of the giant T&G in 1956 and rapidly emerged as ‘a national figure’ through television and radio appearances. ‘His speed of thought and dialectical gifts are familiar to every viewer, so are his watchful eye, his swift changes from evident suspicion to candour and confidence, and the way his relaxed good-natured bearing suddenly stiffens into cold hostility.’ As a union leader, continued the profile, his approach could be summed up as ‘militancy to be kept high at all times, action to be taken only through the established machinery’. As for his broader politics, ‘He is a Socialist consciously, if at times slowly, working to shape a society from which one day the private profit motive will have been eliminated.’ About the same time, Julian Symons for the Daily Mail interviewed Cousins at his spacious office in Transport House, to which he had driven from Epsom in his Ford Zephyr. Symons observed to him that, sitting behind his large desk, he looked like a big business executive. To which, with a ‘pleasant, faintly smiling expression’, Cousins replied: ‘Yes, you might say that. Of course, I get here earlier [8.30] than most business men seem to do, and I leave a good deal later, and while I’m here I don’t do the same sort of thing. There are differences, don’t you think?’ By 1958 he was undoubtedly the best-known trade unionist, and equally undoubtedly he was in the sights of a Tory government still smarting from its defeat by the engineers and shipbuilders the previous year and now increasingly committed to a policy of wage restraint.
‘A London bus strike’, noted Macmillan in his diary on 29 April, ‘now seems inevitable’. This followed the failure of protracted negotiations over wages between the busmen and the London Transport Executive, and he added that ‘it may be salutary’. At a rally of 6,000 London busmen at the Empress Hall in Earl’s Court on Friday 2 May, Cousins in effect said that, left to himself, he would not have been pushing for a strike that might well prove very hard to win, but that he honoured the busmen’s determination to pursue their just cause and was proud to be leading them. The busmen themselves were virtually solid. ‘A strike’s deadly action, really, but we want what’s right,’ one of them told the journalist John Gale. ‘Take my own case. The rent’s just gone up 15s; National Health’s gone up; coal’s gone up about a shilling a quarter ton; my wife says she wants more money. Well, what can you do?’ Another agreed: ‘The job’s not what it was. We were the second best paid on the industrial list; now we’re fifty-seventh.’15
The strike duly began on the 5th, with most of the national press (including the Manchester Guardian) hostile, the Mirror neutral and the Express soon unashamedly demonising Cousins. From the start it failed to be more than an inconvenience. ‘John doesn’t mind,’ recorded Judy Haines in Chingford on the 11th. ‘He can park at Turnpike Lane and then by underground to Piccadilly. It has also proved that Central London is far better off without great buses blocking the traffic. I feel sorry for busmen’s wives having to feed their families just the same.’ Then within days came the major blow of the government settling with the strike-threatening railwaymen, leaving the busmen isolated. Cousins himself, moreover, was equally isolated within the trade union leadership as a whole. ‘They wanted Cousins taken down a peg,’ recalled Iain Macleod, the tactically brilliant Minister of Labour. ‘They didn’t like him. They wanted to ensure that the Government didn’t cave in to him, because it would have made their job that much more difficult.’ ‘TUC,’ noted Macmillan by the end of the month, ‘are obviously pressing Cousins to settle the bus strike somehow. I fear, however, that he is in a sort of Wagnerian–Hitlerian mood. “Fight to the last penny, & bring the whole nation crashing down.”’
‘Very depressed,’ lamented Gladys Langford on 1 June. ‘Continued ’bus strike imprisons me in this one room.’ Indeed, the public mood now began to harden against the busmen, not least as it turned out to be the wettest June for half a century. ‘To blazes with Cousins and his followers,’ declared Mrs C. Cheesman of Salisbury Road, Manor Park to the Evening News on the 3rd. ‘I blame union members for not standing on their own feet. I know who has the biggest worry – the housewife.’ Cousins by this time knew that he had either to end the strike or to extend it, with the latter option involving bringing out the oil-tanker drivers, but it was an option that the TUC General Council, told by Macmillan that he would not hesitate to use troops if need be, flatly refused to countenance. The end eventually came after seven weeks. ‘The buses start running again tomorrow,’ noted an unsympathetic Anthony Heap on the 20th. ‘And precious little the fools have gained by it.’ Indeed, with Londoners having got accustomed during the strike to using alternative forms of transport, the dispute marked the moment – in London anyway – when gradually declining bus use (with the rise of the private car) turned into headlong fall. ‘What is clear to anyone roaming around London is that the buses look strangely empty,’ observed Mollie Panter-Downes in early July, and she anticipated the ‘sad’ day ‘when the only note of scarlet on the London streets will turn out to be a fire engine’.
‘One of the good things that came out of that dispute,’ Cousins would remark many years later about the bus strike to his biographer Geoffrey Goodman, ‘was an awareness of the importance of trade unionism: an awareness that had not been there for some time previously.’ Arguably, that awareness already existed. ‘At the present time the power of the Trade Unions is such that you have a dictator state within a democratic state,’ the farmer-writer A. G. Street had declared in February on Any Questions?, in the context of a controversial – three men alleged to be in the wrong union – National Union of Toolmakers stoppage; he added (to applause) that ‘every time the law of the country is flouted by anybody, even Trade Unions, this nation is going one step nearer to Fascism with all its horrors’. During the bus strike itself, Punch (then serialising Alan Hackney’s satirical I’m All Right, Jack, featuring a Communist shop steward, Mr Kite) ran a full-page cartoon by Illingworth depicting the unions as anti-democratic. Florence Turtle in Wimbledon Park probably spoke for most of the diarists when she reflected, ‘What a lot of silly sheep members of trade unions are – haven’t got the guts to say they don’t want to strike, do so at the behest of extremists.’16
Among Tories generally, a significant element wanted a wholly uncompromising response to almost all wage claims by the unions. ‘Of course,’ somewhat wearily recorded Macmillan on 11 May shortly before his decisive offer to the railwaymen, ‘some ministers & a lot of the Party want a “showdown”.’ Determined though both men were to see off the London busmen, a relatively soft target, that was instinctively not his or Macleod’s approach. ‘I am very anxious that the Govt, while firm, shd not seem to be obstinate,’ Macmillan had noted a month earlier in relation to the railwaymen. ‘Above all, we must not “challenge” the T. Unions (as people like Lord Hinchingbrooke wd like). We must appeal to the Unions, & try to take ourselves some constructive initiative.’ Next day, returning to the subject, he observed that ‘the middle class’ were ‘so angry’ that needless confrontation with the unions would lead to ‘bitterness’ and ‘class war’. Unsurprisingly, neither man was enthused when in June the Inns of Court Conservative Association published a report, co-authored by Geoffrey Howe and called A Giant’s Strength, which asserted that the unions had become ‘over-mighty subjects’ and argued for ending their long-established legal privileges. Macleod sent a senior Ministry of Labour official to warn off the authors from publicising their pamphlet, while Macmillan, with an election in the not too distant offing, saw no reason to revise his conclusion the previous year that the Tories would not have won in 1951 or 1955 without a sizeable trade unionist vote, an
d that therefore it ‘would be inexpedient to adopt any policy involving legislation which would alienate this support’.17
Macmillan’s principal domestic concern during 1958 was to get the political and economic cycles roughly aligned, which in practice meant keeping as tight a lid as possible on unemployment through starting to reflate the economy – a process helped by having a largely amenable Chancellor in Heathcoat Amory. His Budget in April was broadly neutral, still targeting inflation and keeping in place the restrictive measures of the previous September. But during the summer, the Bank Rate started steadily to come down, and crucially, in early July, credit controls (particularly in relation to bank lending) were lifted. ‘It is now generally agreed that measures to expand the economy are desirable,’ purred the FT, ‘and that a moderate increase in demand for goods and services would not add to the dangers of rising prices; nor would it endanger the position of sterling.’ For Macmillan, the Treasury storm of six months earlier seemed a blessedly distant memory. ‘The Chancellor of Ex is really handling the economy with great skill,’ he reflected at the end of July. ‘Cautious where necessary, but not afraid of bolder action. He is worth 20 Thorneycrofts!’18
The political mood music did much to inform his buoyant assessment. Back in mid-June, five by-elections ‘turned out very well indeed for us’; soon afterwards, the bus strike collapsed, amidst much praise for the government’s firmness; by late June the Tories were only 3½ points behind Labour in the latest opinion poll; and on 9 July, Gallup revealed the two parties level pegging at 47½ per cent each, with the brief Liberal bubble having seemingly burst. Altogether it had been, commented the New Statesman, a ‘breathtaking’ swing to the Tories. Five days after that most recent Gallup poll, at a selection meeting for the Finchley constituency, an unaccompanied Margaret Thatcher (with Denis in South Africa) narrowly saw off three men, all of whom had been to public school and all of whom had their wives with them. ‘Tories Choose Beauty’ was the Evening Standard’s headline, but she still had a final hurdle to jump: the acceptance of the whole local Association, meeting on 31 July. This she did with élan. ‘Speaking without notes, stabbing home points with expressive hands,’ reported the Finchley Press,
Mrs Thatcher launched fluently into a clear-cut appraisal of the Middle East situation, weighed up Russia’s propagandist moves with the skill of a housewife measuring the ingredients in a familiar recipe, pinpointed Nasser as the fly in the mixing bowl, switched swiftly to Britain’s domestic problems (showing a keen grasp of wage and Trade Union issues), then swept her breathless audience into a confident preview of Conservatism’s dazzling future.
As he watched his once-commanding lead being wiped out, these were difficult days for Hugh Gaitskell. On 27 June the Daily Herald gave a small private lunch for him in St Ermin’s Hotel. The Labour leader, remembered the paper’s Geoffrey Goodman, was in ‘a passionate mood’ as he analysed his party’s slippage:
Why, he enquired, aren’t the public reacting against the Conservatives? He believed it was because the Labour Party had not departed sufficiently from its old ‘working-class attitudes’. People in Britain, he reflected, were in the main ‘radical’ but not socialist; they wanted a ‘left of centre radical party’ which would make social changes without being revolutionary or authoritarian. More and more, he believed, the ‘Keir Hardie image was becoming a dim and distant feature of the past’. The Labour Party had to find some more modern image if it was to be a successful force. There was now a feeling of prosperity among the working class, he observed, and this was turning the British electorate into a largely middle-class vote.
A fortnight later, lunching at the Athenaeum with Richard Crossman, Gaitskell pursued the theme again. ‘Working-class people,’ he insisted, ‘are week by week becoming less working class, less class-conscious and more allergic to such old appeals as trade union solidarity or class loyalty. Anything we say which can be used as being merely class interest loses us votes.’ Did this mean that Labour was inevitably doomed to lose? ‘We’ve got to win the next Election,’ Gaitskell kept repeating to Crossman, but a few days later the diarist noted that ‘even’ Roy Jenkins, ‘who was one of the great addicts of the theory that we were bound to win, now admits that we are faced with a possibility of defeat’.19
As if on cue, two very different working-class archetypes were on display this month. ‘The year was 1957, the morning bright and gay/On the ninth of February John Axon drove away,’ began The Ballad of John Axon on the Home Service at 10 p.m. on 2 July – the story of an engine driver who the previous year in a railway accident near Buxton had died heroically to save many others, and the first of the celebrated Radio Ballads. Created by the folk singers Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, and produced by Charles Parker, these were pioneering programmes: not only did they celebrate working-class lives, but in a potent blend of music and recorded speech they told their stories through the voices of ordinary people, not professional actors. ‘This really was some of the characteristic poetry of the idiom of the people,’ declared W. L. Webb next day in the Manchester Guardian, being especially struck by the ‘gentle reminiscing Northern voices’, while Tom Driberg in the New Statesman called it ‘this superb piece of radio’. Even so, the programme’s Appreciation Index of 61 was five below the Home Service average, and the reaction of individual listeners was at best mixed. ‘Unconventional, untraditional, but all completely right, nothing jarred,’ noted one, another that ‘it was refreshing to hear songs which have some relationship with everyday working-class existence, rather than the moon/June noises of tin-pan alley’; but a third listener reckoned that the treatment ‘smothered and almost buried the story of a gallant man hurtling to his death’, and a fourth that ‘John Axon deserved something better than this pseudo-American Annie-get-your-gun-Calypso nonsense’.
‘Pop’ Larkin’s life was not the sort that MacColl et al were ever likely to celebrate. H. E. Bates’s new novel The Darling Buds of May was, noted Penelope Mortimer in her Sunday Times review on the 13th, about ‘the family of Larkins – six children, Pop and Ma – who make a fortune out of market-gardening and rather dubious deals, and live in a state of blissful Rabelaisian squalor’. Whereupon: ‘A weedy young tax inspector arrives with the absurd intention of trying to get Pop to make an income-tax return. He is persuaded to stay and, transformed by Pop’s eccentric taste in drink and by the lovely Mariette, remains to become Pop’s son-in-law and partner in future piratical schemes to outwit the Welfare State.’ Mortimer, although not much enjoying the book on her own account, had little doubt about its likely popularity, claiming that Bates had ‘reached the zenith of his talent for creating life as millions of readers wish it could be’. It was a perceptive assessment of the author’s intentions. ‘The Larkin philosophy,’ Bates himself would recall,
is all carpe diem and the very antithesis of the Welfare State. The Larkins’ secret is in fact that they live as many of us would like to live if only we had the guts and nerve to flout the conventions. Pop and Ma demonstrate that they have the capacity by indulging deeply in love and champagne before breakfast, passion in the bluebell wood and encouraging their enchanting daughter to a life of wilful seduction.
Modesty, however, forbade him to quote the novel’s most arresting piece of dialogue: ‘Pass me the tomato ketchup. I’ve got a bit of iced bun to finish up.’20
Of course, most people (including working-class people) were neither selfless Axons nor look-after-number-one Larkins; and most people naturally enjoyed the rising, if unevenly rising, sense of prosperity and widening range of material goods. Anthony Crosland was on the right side of the historical curve when in May he produced a highly critical report on the Co-operative movement, including its many shops. ‘In many areas the word “co-operative” is associated with a drab, colourless, old-fashioned mediocrity,’ with ‘too many societies’ being run ‘complacently and unimaginatively’. This, he insisted, was ‘not good enough for the consumer in 1958’; indeed it betrayed ‘a
somewhat patronising and insulting attitude to the wants and expectations of the ordinary co-operative member’, whose tastes were ‘changing and rising rapidly’. The reaction from Labour’s left was predictably negative (‘Why,’ wondered Tribune, ‘should Co-ops ape the capitalists?’), as it was from the Co-operative movement itself, and to Crosland’s intense frustration his report – recommending fundamental change, including a drastically slimmed-down structure to the whole unwieldy organisation – largely gathered dust. Instead, the consumer future lay elsewhere. ‘Our many outlets make it possible for us to take advantage of bulk buying to the full and we are constantly on the look-out for new lines and new ideas,’ declared an unblinking champion of private enterprise, Jack Cohen, at Tesco’s AGM in July, as he announced trading profits up by more than 50 per cent. ‘Our policy is to give the best possible value.’ Looking ahead, he promised a ‘programme of constant modernisation of branches’.21
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