Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  The housing trends by the late 1950s had an even more significant political dimension, as is suggested by the annual breakdown for permanent dwellings built in England and Wales:

  Local authorities Private builders

  1956 149,139 119,585

  1957 145,711 122,942

  1958 117,438 124,087

  1959 102,905 146,476

  Macmillan was fully alert to the potential dividend of stimulating the number of owner-occupiers, and during 1958 (the year that Lawrie Barratt formed a house-building company in Newcastle, initially focusing on first-time buyers) he overrode Treasury objections and pushed his Housing Minister into developing the concept of 100-per-cent, government-supported mortgages, as enshrined in due course in the House Purchase and Housing Act of 1959. ‘Whatever the Opposition may say now,’ declared the junior Housing Minister Reginald Bevins in the Commons debate on the Bill in December 1958, ‘the fact of the matter is that the Labour Party has always been secretly, not publicly, contemptuous of the conception of a property-owning democracy. [HON. MEMBERS: “Nonsense.”] Of course, they have. Indeed, from their own point of view, they are probably right, because it is not part of the Socialist mission in this land to manufacture Conservatives.’6

  Nevertheless, those Hon. Members opposite were by and large in an optimistic frame of mind during the winter of 1958–9, notwithstanding the recent tightening in the polls and an instantly celebrated Vicky cartoon in the New Statesman in November dubbing the PM as ‘Supermac’. Rising prices, rising unemployment (up by February 1959 to 620,000, the highest level since 1947), a deteriorating balance of payments – no wonder that, in Geoffrey Goodman’s words, ‘both Left and Right wings of the Labour Movement felt that 1959 would bring a Labour Government to power with Gaitskell as Prime Minister’. Admittedly the temporary accord between Left and Right was paper-thin – ‘Gaitskell’s piddling all the time for fear of losing the Election,’ Nye Bevan scornfully told Dick Crossman in December – but at least it existed. There was even a glossy new policy document in place, The Future Labour Offers You, launched during the autumn in tandem with a notably effective party political broadcast. Yet two indicators this winter might have given pause for thought. In November a detailed analysis in the Financial Times concluded that ‘the long post-war decline in the economic position of the middle class has now been halted’; and in January the publication of weekly averages of shop sales for 1958 revealed that a sharp drop in the early months had given way, following the end of the credit squeeze, to a steep rise between August and the end of the year. Bevan, though, was adamant. ‘We shall win the Election,’ he informed Crossman, ‘and the trouble will come very soon afterwards.’7

  One direction in which Labour did not look for lessons was from the New Left. On the same evening as Bevan’s predictions, Brian Abel-Smith read a paper to the Fabian Society, with Anthony Wedgwood Benn among those present. In it he advocated that the Fabians become more like the Universities and Left Review, which (in Benn’s words, reporting Abel-Smith) ‘got five or six hundred to their meetings’, whereas ‘we were completely missing young people’. Abel-Smith further urged the Fabians to ‘meet in a coffee house instead of in large bare halls’. Whereupon: ‘Tony Crosland opened the attack. He said that he could see nothing of interest in the ULR except that “there’s a man who seems to be able to run a coffee house”. He thought that political activity under the age of thirty-five was not of great interest to the Fabians . . . All this was said in a most bored and offensive way.’ The others who spoke ‘agreed with Tony to a greater or lesser extent’, except for Benn himself, who argued that ‘the question we had to face was whether we had anything relevant to say in the modern world’.

  The coffee house that Crosland so disdainfully referred to was the Partisan at the ULR’s premises at 7 Carlisle Street in Soho – a place not only for food and drink (‘Bill of fare includes Farmhouse Soup . . . Borscht . . . Irish Peasant Stew . . . Liver dumplings . . . Boiled Breconshire Mutton with caper sauce . . . Apple dumplings with hot lemon sauce . . . Whitechapel cheese-cake and pastries . . . Vienna coffee . . . café filtre . . . Russian tea’) but also chess, music and debate. The venture was run by the ebullient, charismatic, hopelessly disorganised young historian Ralph (later Raphael) Samuel, by this time based at the Institute of Community Studies. ‘He obviously has tremendous faith in people and in his beliefs,’ reflected Phyllis Willmott after talking to him at a Christmas party. ‘I find his earnest idealism most wonderfully touching.’ In January, intrigued, she visited the Partisan and found ‘mostly odd cranks and broken-down “artists”’, often ‘sporting beards or berets’, as well as serious-looking young students. ‘Girls in duffle coats and black stockings, young boys in old jackets. A coloured man began to play the guitar more or less spontaneously as I could judge. I felt very sophisticated and elegant by comparison, although I wasn’t.’8

  Benn’s ‘modern world’ was coming on apace. On the morning of 5 December, two days after the pit-closures announcement, Macmillan inaugurated the 8.5-mile Preston Bypass, Britain’s first stretch of motorway and, subsequently, part of the M6. ‘In the years to come,’ the PM declared, ‘the county and country alike may look at the Preston Bypass – a fine thing in itself but a finer thing as a symbol – as a token of what is to follow’; pressing a button, he cut the traditional tape by remote control; and then, watched by 200 cheering schoolchildren from what The Times called ‘one of the futuristic-looking bridges that straddle the motorway’, he was driven along in a Rolls-Royce Landau. On another front, though in public call boxes it was still a case of insert four pennies and press button A, there was major progress too, for later that day the Queen visited Bristol telephone exchange and directly dialled an Edinburgh number (031 CAL 3636), thereby inaugurating the new subscriber trunk dialling (STD) system. ‘Those present then heard an amplified voice reply: “The Lord Provost of Edinburgh speaking,” to which the Queen replied: “This is the Queen speaking, from Bristol. Good afternoon, Lord Provost.”’ Back in Preston, the AA in the evening reported traffic flowing at 400 vehicles an hour at an average speed of 70 mph, with excellent lane discipline and ‘exemplary’ signalling, though it did regretfully add that ‘the speed and density of the traffic’ would probably make a traditional salute from their patrols ‘impracticable’.

  Literary tastes – like many other tastes – remained for the most part defiantly unmodern. ‘Mr and Mrs Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform,’ began Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington, inspired by a stocking-filler bear he had bought for his wife at Selfridges the previous Christmas Eve. The TLS was only cautiously enthusiastic about Bond’s creation (‘it must be said that a 6-year-old to whom the book was read laughed himself sick over some of the slapstick’), but the entire first print run rapidly sold out. So too did John Betjeman’s Collected Poems, though not without the odd dissenting note amidst the general enthusiasm. ‘I wish he wouldn’t appear to be writing off some millions of his fellow humans because they say “Pardon”,’ reflected Janet Adam Smith in the New Statesman, while K. W. Gransden in the Listener, after acknowledging the poet was ‘in the rare position of being both chic and popular’, teased out the implications of how Betjeman’s ‘own emotions enter into everything he writes’:

  He really feels it and means it. Does class matter? By jove, yes. Down with vulgar new rich City men; down with suburban pseudo-gentility; down with supercinemas, neon, fish and chips, chromium; down with the phoney picture-postcard England of the brewers’ advertisements. Up with romantic Baker-street buffet; up with churches; up with the Home Counties and horses. Down, in short, with the century of the common man, and up with the past from about 1880 to 1914.

  And of course one sometimes agrees. Mr Betjeman is an extraordinarily accurate observer and recorder of middle-class manners and prejudices, some of which are endearing and even good. But at times the exclusiveness and triviality of this point of view seems ignoble and, like all rearguard ac
tions, rather pathetic. It is all very funny; but how seldom one laughs without a pharisaic snigger; and how unscrupulously Mr Betjeman beguiles and flatters us into accepting his values along with his verbal felicities. We may feel cleverer, ‘nicer’, or even more U after reading him; we rarely feel better.

  Shortly before Christmas, at the Hyde Park Gate home of Enid Bagnold, Betjeman was presented with the Duff Cooper Prize by Princess Margaret. ‘A really thrilling moment of triumph,’ Betjeman wrote afterwards to his publisher Jock Murray, while another publisher present at the ceremony, Rupert Hart-Davis, told his old schoolmaster, ‘My dear George, she is exquisitely beautiful, very small and neat and shapely, with a lovely skin and staggering blue eyes.’9

  Tom Driberg’s swoon of choice was Cliff Richard. ‘Though he is said to be in private life a modest and likeable Hertfordshire lad,’ the politician noted about this time following his latest performance on Oh Boy!, ‘he has been taught to assume just the right look of delinquent fretfulness: his eyes have the smouldering but fixed glare of a sulky basilisk; his coiffure is mountainously upswept. A menacingly one-sided Ozymandias curl of the lip reveals strong incisors.’ A few days later, the New Musical Express reported that Cliff now had a new manager (the tough-minded impresario Tito Burns, keen from the start to turn him into ‘an all-round entertainer’); that his parents, with whom he still lived in Cheshunt, had been promised for Christmas ‘a 17 in. console television set’; and that his plan for Christmas Eve was to go for ‘a bumper Chinese spread’ at Edgware Road’s Lotus House (London’s first upmarket Chinese restaurant, run by John Koon). Elsewhere in pop-land, Tommy Steele was now already taking his first step on the primrose path to all-round entertainer, starring at the Coliseum as Buttons in Cinderella, alongside the ‘handle-bar moustached comedian’ Jimmy Edwards (of current Whack-O! fame) and ‘Television glamour girl Yana’, an altogether ‘odd, not to say outlandish conglomeration of talents’. The descriptions were by Anthony Heap, present of course at the first night (18 December) and his usual implacable self: the ‘rock ’n’ roll idol’ brought ‘to his first stage acting part little but an atrocious cockney accent’, while Edwards ‘seldom contrives to be funny, least of all in his long-winded trumpet-playing solo act’. Alan Brien in the Spectator agreed about Steele’s deficiencies (‘his timing is embarrassingly erratic and he moves as stiffly as a stilt-dancer’), with the panto’s only redeeming feature being Kenneth Williams as a ‘campy sister’.

  In the days after Christmas, two faces of the future were sighted on the small screen. On ITV’s Small Time for younger viewers, Muriel Young read ‘Little Rocky: The rocket who was afraid of heights’, and on the BBC, the quiz game Ask Me Another (produced by Ned Sherrin) included Ted ‘Farmer’ Moult, praised by viewers for his ‘wonderful good humour’ and treating the programme ‘certainly seriously, but as a game, and not as a grim contest’. There were plaudits too for the chairman Franklin Engelmann – ‘firm, fair, friendly, quick-witted and always very natural’, noted an insurance agent – while a marine fitter called the whole thing ‘not only instructive, but also very interesting and entertaining’. Even so, the show captured only 16 per cent of the working-class audience, with 36 per cent opting instead for Emergency—Ward 10 on the other channel.10

  The trade unions may have trailed far behind the Royal Family in terms of the public having a ‘favourable’ attitude, but with 51 per cent they did better in Gallup’s November poll than the City and Stock Exchange, which managed only 44 per cent, though with a high ‘neutral’ (in practice indifferent?) rating of 40 per cent. ‘The City must often to foreign eyes seem deceptively sleepy; it does not take fleets of lawyers to reach an agreement; it often likes to pretend that it is more old-fashioned than it is,’ the Financial Times complacently reflected a few weeks later. ‘At Christmas we can allow ourselves the favourite English pastime of congratulating ourselves on being a lot shrewder than we are taken for. Let other people be “too clever by half” so long as we can be “not such fools as we look.”’ But as it happened, two stories at the end of the year and going into 1959 suddenly put the City unusually and at times uncomfortably in the national spotlight.

  Shortly after Christmas the government announced the full convertibility of sterling held by non-residents. ‘Pound Flies High’ (Sunday Express), ‘This Proud, Free £’ (Daily Express) and ‘The £ Stands Firm on Freedom Day’ (Evening Standard) was the patriotic chorus of the Beaverbrook press, while the FT declared that sterling’s convertibility, following on from the end of credit controls, meant that ‘now, for the first time, it is possible to claim that the post-war period, with all its artificial pressures and constraints, is over and done with’. The Economist’s line on ‘An Act of Bravery?’ was altogether more cautious: ‘The main meaning of the move is that Britain, as the world’s leading short-term banker, will now be more formally (and therefore possibly more forcefully) committed to take the strain upon its gold reserves whenever any other currency in the world is regarded as temporarily more desirable to hold than sterling.’ And, accepting that ‘to voice these misgivings is just another way of saying that Britain is, for better or worse, in the international banking business’, it concluded: ‘Sterling sets sail on a long voyage in a fair weather ship at a moment when the weather forecast is favourable. Let us hope, indeed everybody must hope, that it will remain favourable. But it is rash to bet that it will do so for ever.’

  What were the domestic implications of what one economic historian calls ‘Britain’s new cosmopolitanism’? Although the announcement itself provoked no great controversy, Anthony Crosland would state the potential downside forcibly in a Third Programme talk in early February. Claiming (probably correctly) that the ‘strongest pressure’ behind the decision had come from the Bank of England and the City, wanting convertibility ‘in order to enhance the position of London as a world banker and financial centre’, he called it ‘a disastrous approach’ – given not only that ‘the financial earnings of the City from overseas business are trivial in relation to our balance of payments’ but that ‘every step in the direction [i.e. of financial liberalisation, ultimately leading to the end of exchange controls] increases our vulnerability to speculation’. And:

  The really serious thing about all this is that our domestic policies are increasingly dictated by the holders of sterling – by bankers in Zurich and London, by speculators all over the world, and by traders using sterling as an international trading currency. These people are not, unfortunately, as the City likes to think they are, highly rational and sophisticated judges of the true state of the British economy. On the contrary, they are often naive, volatile, and ill-informed – as they were, for example, when they caused the sterling crisis of 1957; or else they are plain incompetent, as the City syndicate was in the recent British Aluminium dispute. Yet the fear of what they may do to sterling increasingly influences our Bank rate policy, our rate of economic expansion, our wages policy, and now – to judge from a recent leading article in The Economist – even what taxation policy we are allowed to pursue. Heaven alone knows – or rather I can easily guess – what their attitude would be to the policies of a Labour Government.

  In short, in characteristic Crosland tones (and, no doubt, drawl): ‘All this seems to me an intolerable derogation of British sovereignty; the more tiresome since bankers and speculators are all natural deflationists and their influence is invariably against a rapid rate of growth.’11

  The ‘British Aluminium dispute’ to which Crosland referred was the other story.12 In essence it was a disputatious, high-profile City set-piece arising out of the contested takeover of British Aluminium (BA), an ailing company whose chairman was Viscount Portal of Hungerford, Chief of Air Staff during the war and now president of the MCC. The rival bidders were on the one hand the Aluminium Company of America, favoured by BA, and on the other hand an alliance of an American company, Reynolds Metals, and a British one, Tube Investments (TI). The prestigious, ultra-respectable m
erchant banks Hambros and Lazards were advising BA, while for the other side the principal adviser was Warburgs, a recently created Jewish merchant bank headed by Siegmund Warburg that was still regarded with considerable suspicion by the City Establishment. ‘Rather a “Gentleman v. Players” affair’, was how Macmillan privately characterised the Aluminium War (as it became known), and the whole episode would prove richly symbolic.

  Amidst considerable acrimony between the two camps, the dramatic denouement began in the last few days of 1958 when Hambros and Lazards formed a City consortium of the great and the good (including Morgan Grenfell, Brown Shipley and Robert Fleming) to protect BA from the attentions of Reynolds/TI, a grand alliance prompted less by a dispassionate analysis of what was best for BA than a visceral dislike of hostile takeover bids, still a relative rarity. Kim Cobbold, governor of the Bank of the England, tried to arrange a truce between the two parties, which in practice meant persuading them not to engage in further buying of BA shares. But during the early days of 1959, while the City consortium heeded Cobbold’s wishes, Warburgs did not, deploying the black arts of what Cobbold himself crisply called ‘monkey business’. Put simply, one side played cricket, the other did not. By 6 January, Reynolds/TI had achieved majority control; the following week, The Times published an extraordinary letter by Olaf Hambro, claiming that the wishes of the City had been violated.13