Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  The show’s almost instant popularity no doubt reflected a winning formula – fascination with the variety of jobs on display (most famously the saggar maker’s bottom-knocker in the pottery industry) and the almost novel attraction of seeing ordinary people on television – but there was also fascination with Harding himself. Partly it was his sheer rudeness (‘I am tired of looking at you,’ he famously snapped at one particularly sphinx-like contestant), partly because the former schoolmaster’s manifest intelligence seemed so out of place, and partly because it was impossible not to speculate what lay behind that moustachioed, sometimes self-pitying face almost invariably wreathed in cigarette smoke. Indisputably he was the dominant television star of the first half of the 1950s, with an off-air persona just as crusty and dogmatic, not least through a regular crusading column in the People that tackled bureaucrats who were giving individuals a hard time. ‘All who remember him know he bristled with prejudice,’ noted John Betjeman in a subsequent appreciation: ‘They knew his feelings about American civilisation, the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy, about so-called progress, about plastics, and his deep mistrust of majority opinions, civil servants and everything that goes with officialdom and the suppression of the individual. In his way Gilbert Harding, by being his irascible, generous self, did more to encourage the individual against domination by the State and heartless theorists than any television personality of his time.’3 That such a set of attitudes could, so soon after the ‘1945’ welfare-state revolution, strike such a chord was suggestive indeed.

  The film of the summer, premiered about a fortnight before the launch of What’s My Line?, was undoubtedly The Lavender Hill Mob, an Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness in which the police were treated somewhat less deferentially than in the previous year’s The Blue Lamp, but not radically so. Gore Vidal would claim that Guinness modelled his part on the young actor-turned-critic Kenneth Tynan, especially ‘the way that Tynan stagily held a cigarette between ring and little fingers’. Tynan himself, signed up by the Evening Standard, was now making his mark. Danny Kaye at the Palladium was first in his sights (‘trades on sex-appeal too openly ever to be a recruit to the small troupe of great clowns’), then the ‘periwinkle charm’ of Vivien Leigh, starring that summer with her husband Laurence Olivier in Antony and Cleopatra: ‘Hers is the magnificent effrontery of an attractive child, endlessly indulged at its first party.’ Letters of disgust immediately followed, but Tynan was unconcerned; Noël Coward soon afterwards found him to be ‘charming, very intelligent and with a certain integrity’. Neither was at the Coventry Hippodrome in early September for the first night of Zip Goes a Million, an American-style musical about a man who has to spend a million dollars in order to inherit a fortune of seven million. ‘George Formby is the undisputed star of the show, an eminence he gains by being determinedly and more than ever George Formby,’ declared the local paper. ‘He displays his old genius for provoking laughter by the least of his broad-vowelled asides. Once again he is the one-man pantomime that never palls.’ Admittedly the ukulele-playing Lancashire comedian told ‘a clamant audience’ at the end of the performance that there had been ‘a bit of a muck-up at times’, but there was justifiable confidence that the under-rehearsed production would be in good order by the time it got to London the following month.4

  The summer’s big sporting drama, attended by massive publicity, was also an Anglo-American affair. No one gave Randolph Turpin, a black boxer from Leamington Spa who had been a cook in the navy, a chance in his fight on 10 July at Earl’s Court against the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson for the world middleweight title. In the event he won quite comfortably on points – even though the radio summariser, the fruity W. Barrington Dalby, badly misled almost twenty-five million listeners by pronouncing that ‘only a whirlwind grandstand finish can possibly snatch it for Turpin’, an assessment with which Raymond Glendenning (‘portly, pertly-voiced commentator with handlebar moustache’, in Frank Keating’s words) concurred. Dalby afterwards claimed that he had meant ‘clinch’ not ‘snatch’, but that did not save the patrician pair from an avalanche of criticism. Just over a fortnight later, the far from proletarian Dorian Williams was the television commentator for the Horse of the Year Show at White City stadium. ‘My cup of happiness was full,’ recorded Vere Hodgson (there in person), ‘for we saw Foxhunter jump with Colonel [Harry] Llewellyn riding and we saw Rusty with Miss Kellett and we saw Miss Pat Smythe. We all held our breath while Foxhunter jumped, and then he was cheered to the echo . . .’ Later, Hodgson went round to the stables and fed the mighty Foxhunter with sugar. It was exactly a week later, on the Saturday at the start of the August Bank Holiday weekend, that Wally Hammond, the great Gloucestershire and England batsman of the inter-war era, was persuaded to come out of retirement to play against Somerset at Bristol. A crowd of 10,000 saw him survive a first-ball lbw appeal from Horace Hazell and then scratch around for 50 minutes, making only seven, before being clean bowled by Hazell. The future actor Milton Johns, then a Bristol schoolboy, was taken to the match by his father, complete with ‘a flask of tea and enough tomato sandwiches to feed half the crowd’. Owing to three changes of bus they arrived too late, ‘Oh dear’ being his father’s restrained comment on seeing the scoreboard. ‘He had slipped through my fingers and was lost forever, leaving me with a lifelong conviction that one should never go back, but always forward,’ reflected Johns over half a century later. ‘Did Wally Hammond feel the same, as he mounted those long pavilion steps that day? Maybe, or should I say probably?’5

  There were no twilight shadows for Margaret Rose, 21 later that month. Whole packs of reporters pursued the glamorous, vivacious, fairy-tale princess to Balmoral, where their lack of access did not prevent torrents of gushing, breathless prose about the latest developments. ‘Yes, HE WAS on the 9.46,’ started the despatch from Mamie Baird in the Daily Express on the actual morning of her birthday. ‘He’ was 24-year-old Billy Wallace, who had arrived to join the royal party having ‘at the last minute changed his plan to drive all the way from London to Balmoral in a dashing red sports car’. Next day the paper’s Eve Perrick gave the lowdown:

  The Princess’s birthday party was such a cosy affair.

  After dinner – grouse again – at Balmoral Castle, the green carpets were rolled back, the radiogram moved in, and Princess Margaret’s grand birthday ball began.

  After all the scarcely suppressed excitement there was no shiny dance floor swept by the trains and trailing skirts of romantic gowns, no famous bands, no floodlit gardens, no coronets, and no fuss.

  Just high spirits and friendly fun, with the two Princesses, their best friends, and some of the Duke of Edinburgh’s cousins participating . . .

  But The Times, in its leader to mark the occasion, warned against a new intrusiveness – ‘having wished her many happy returns of the day and been told how in general she spent it, her fellow-citizens would be glad if the family party were left undisturbed’ – before concluding that ‘her future will be followed with kindly good wishes by all, in every corner of the Commonwealth, who know the priceless value of a happy home background’.6

  A month earlier, on 17 July, illness had prevented the King from opening the Steel Company of Wales’s huge new continuous-strip mill at Port Talbot, though he did send a message heralding its contribution to ‘our ability to maintain our historic position in a free world’. Instead, Hugh Gaitskell, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, did the honours – appropriately enough, given that the steel industry had recently been taken into public ownership. The site had previously been some 500 acres of marshland and sand dunes, and it was claimed that the conversion into steelworks was the biggest single project in Britain since the railway age. ‘Today the 200-ton ladle was seen to pour metal from one of the eight new open-hearth steel furnaces into moulds,’ reported the man from The Times at the opening ceremony. ‘The 20-ton ingots, still brilliantly red, were run one by one down to the slabbing mill to be rolled into slabs. The process was c
ontrolled by a flick of the finger and a movement of the foot.’ It was a great day for the locals, not only in terms of future employment prospects, as Gaitskell led a party of some 1,200 luminaries, including (in the words of the Port Talbot Guardian) ‘the most fabulous names in British industry’. But steel was not quite everything, and that Tuesday evening, at a meeting of the Port Talbot Borough Council, there was a disquieting moment as Councillor Idwal Hopkins alleged that burial forms were being issued incompletely. He cited a recent case: ‘The husband of the family had died, and the funeral had been all-male. The only son had gone away for six weeks following the funeral, and he had left it to the undertaker to point out the grave to the widow and daughter-in-law. This the undertaker had done, and during the six weeks he was away – every Sunday – the women had placed flowers on the grave. When the son returned he, too, went to the grave, and found that they had been placing the flowers on the wrong grave.’ It was an episode that had, in Hopkins’s words, ‘caused considerable distress’. However, the fact of an all-male funeral was, in this part of south Wales at least, taken for granted.

  Clive Jenkins, the son of a railway worker, had grown up in Port Talbot. ‘He was a precocious child,’ noted an obituary, ‘and seemed set for a good schooling when his father died and he was obliged to go to work at 14. This disappointment had much to do with his future attitudes.’ Now, in the summer of 1951, at the age of 25, he was a member of the Communist Party and a full-time official for the Association of Supervisory Staffs, Executives and Technicians (ASSET), with particular responsibility for organising workers at London (Heathrow) Airport, where he was rapidly increasing union membership. Shortly after his hometown’s hour in the sun, he was at the centre of the civil aviation industry’s first significant dispute, causing the state-owned British European Airways (BEA) to cancel more than 800 fully booked services. ‘Angry passengers “squatted” at Kensington Air Station this morning, waiting to be flown to Nice,’ reported the Daily Mail at the height of the dispute. ‘They had been told that the Argonaut plane chartered for last night’s flight in the B.E.A. cheap-rate service was not available . . . Passengers cried “Iniquitous!” and “What about our bookings?”.’ Soon afterwards, a ministerial intervention by another self-confident operator, Alfred Robens, settled the matter, very much in favour of the white-collar supervisors and technicians whom the already deeply ambitious Jenkins represented. ‘This was my first major national dispute and gave me my first sense of real satisfaction as a collective bargainer,’ Jenkins recalled. ‘Deeply influenced by this set of events, I learned that it was possible to have disputes which were immensely interesting to the public as well as being attractive to potential members as long as they were in high-technology industries.’7

  The major industrial strike of the summer, though, was at the Austin Motor Company’s works at Longbridge, Birmingham. Eventually involving more than 10,000 workers, it was called on Wednesday, 20 June by shop stewards after management had dismissed (and, despite an existing agreement, refused to redeploy) seven men, including Sid Pegg, who was not only an Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) shop steward but also Secretary of the Communist Party’s Longbridge branch. Pegg’s close colleague, Dick Etheridge, works convener and himself an active CP member, insisted to the Birmingham Post that he ‘had proof’ of ‘blacklisting’, adding: ‘We are not silly over redundancies. Shop stewards have not said that they will not accept redundancy in any circumstances.’ It was, in other words, a case of victimisation – which it undoubtedly was. Nevertheless, another prominent shop steward, John McHugh, was adamant that it was not a political dispute, asserting that of the 350 stewards at the meeting that had decided on strike action, only 50 had ‘Communist sympathies’. The crunch came with a mass meeting at Cofton Hackett Park (next to the works) on Monday the 25th. It was, reported the not entirely objective Post, a ‘stormy’ affair:

  Part of the uproar was due to a denunciation by Mr [Dick] Nester, chairman of No 5 Machine Shop stewards, of Communist activity in the factory, which, he said, he had watched for 18 months. Communist propaganda went on daily, he added.

  As he went on to describe the events which led up to the stoppage there were shouts of ‘Take him off!’ and the microphone was taken from him by Mr George Varnon, chairman of the shop stewards committee. This seemed to incense many in the crowd who demanded a hearing from Mr Nester.

  When Mr Varnon said he abided by the decision of the workpeople, somebody in the crowd said ‘You’ve got to!’

  Mr Varnon was shouted down when he tried to tell the workers again of the need for continued support of the strike. There were cries of ‘We’ve heard all he’s got to say’, ‘We want to get back to work’, ‘Put the resolution and let’s vote on it’.

  As the shop stewards convener, Mr R. Etheridge, was putting the motion to continue to strike before the meeting there were cries of: ‘You are trying to mislead us’.

  Eventually, those in the crowd of more than 6,000 who were in favour of returning to work were asked to move to the right, those against to move to the left. A ‘big majority’ moved rightwards. There were two almost immediate outcomes to this humiliating defeat for the more militant shop stewards: the ultra-astute Etheridge privately decided never to call another mass meeting, and the sacked Pegg was soon replaced as CP branch secretary by a young toolroom worker, Derek Robinson, the future ‘Red Robbo’ of tabloid demonisation.8

  Elsewhere in Birmingham, at about the time of the Longbridge dispute, a young researcher called Michael Banton took a walk along Sparkbrook Road, looking at the cards in newspaper-shop windows. He counted more cards from people advertising rooms that stipulated ‘No Irish’ than ‘No Coloured’. But his main research was in Stepney, where during the summer he sent out questionnaires to 40 employers in the clothing and building industries in order to gauge their attitude to the employment of black immigrants. He found that whereas the largely Jewish-run clothing industry saw ‘the coloured man at little disadvantage’, it was different among builders and contractors, where ‘there was a considerably greater resistance to the idea of engaging coloured workers’, particularly on the part of small firms. ‘You have to consider how other people would feel, especially the other employees,’ replied one. ‘There’s not enough work for English people and many of the coloured people only got here by smuggling themselves away.’ Overall, Banton reckoned that ‘from the small numbers employed there is probably a fair amount of discrimination in employment in this trade’, and that ‘in a time of unemployment it would increase’.

  Housing was even more susceptible to prejudice. ‘I have been carrying out a small experiment with the help of my friend O.,’ the left-wing writer Mervyn Jones related in August: ‘We copied down the addresses of ten rooms advertised as “a let” outside a Notting Hill Gate newsagent’s shop. O. went round and asked for rooms; I went to the same addresses twenty minutes later. His score: rooms available at two places, all rooms gone at eight. My score: rooms available at seven, a share offered at another, all rooms gone at two. An odd result; but whereas I belong to what E.M. Forster called the pink-grey race, O. comes from Nigeria.’ In most parts of the country, of course, a black person was still a considerable rarity. The experience of Ian Jack, growing up near Bolton and six in 1951, was probably typical. ‘The first black person I ever saw was on the Piccadilly line, somewhere near Hammersmith,’ he remembered. ‘We’d come to stay with my granny and to see the Festival of Britain. A black man, who wore a smart suit, sat across the train’s aisle and smiled at me. I think my father encouraged me to smile back. Perhaps I had been staring.’9

  The kindness of strangers was probably more common between whites. In June, barely a month after he had started at RADA (‘O bliss!’), a young aspiring actor from Leicester, Joe Orton, was taken to the bosom of another new, more prosperous student, Kenneth Halliwell. ‘Move into Ken’s flat,’ recorded Orton on 16 June, before four expressive entries:

  17 June. Well!

&nb
sp; 18 June. Well!!

  19 June. Well!!!

  20 June. The rest is silence.

  It was also in June that an almost equally young Jeffery Bernard, four months after he had gone AWOL from National Service in Catterick, gave himself up, ringing the police from the Gargoyle Club in Soho at two in the morning. There ensued two brutal days and nights at a military detention centre near Scotland Yard, with Bernard being kicked every few hours by a Scots Guards sergeant, before he was sent back to Yorkshire. His biographer records how ‘when he was being hauled across the concourse at King’s Cross, handcuffed to a Military Policeman, strangers came up and gave him cigarettes, money, sandwiches and a magazine and shouted “good luck, mate” and “don’t let the bastards get you down”.’10

  Summertime, naturally, was also holiday time. ‘It’s been a perfect summer’s day,’ noted Nella Last in Barrow on the last Monday in July, after she and her husband had gone in the afternoon to a nearby beach:

  I watched with real concern at chalk white bodies & limbs in bathing suits – both sex & every age – lying and playing in the strong sea air, many already looking ‘burned’, knowing the agony many would be in tonight. I was sorry for the hapless children, some already beginning to squirm & scratch their sunburned flesh, and I didn’t see one tube of ‘cream’ or oil being used. Long queues constantly stood at a big ice cream stall, fresh supplies were brought twice, but till after 8 o’clock they sold as quickly as they could make sandwiches.