Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Over and above day trips, or the traditional lodging house at a popular resort, there was also the recent, increasingly popular phenomenon of the holiday camp. At about the same time as Last was tut-tutting, the writer C. H. Rolph visited one on Canvey Island, run by the local landowner, councillor and magistrate Colonel Horace Fielder. Rolph asked why he charged £5 (double the usual rate) for a chalet in August. ‘Keep out the rough stuff,’ replied the Colonel. ‘I don’t need the money – this place makes thousands. But it’d be a nightmare here at £2 in August.’

  The research organisation Mass-Observation was also intrigued, and in September sent two investigators to Butlin’s at Clacton. There, like previous M-O investigators at Butlin’s in Filey, they found a world all of its own. In the dining hall, where Kent House and Gloucester House had separate sittings, the House Captain (a Redcoat called Len) addressed the company through a microphone: ‘He invariably started off with: “Good morning, you smashing campers of Gloucester House, and good morning, staff – HI-DE-HI!” to which we answered: “HO-DE-HO”.’ Len himself was born to his role: ‘Tall, swarthy and spivvy, he appeared to be tireless. He was always cracking jokes, pretending to chase the girls and generally clowning. He was enormously popular.’ Most evenings there were Redcoat-compèred ‘sing-songs’ in the Jolly Roger bar, with ‘its olde worlde oak-beam decor’. ‘As well as community singing, individual campers were invited to perform. There was one young man who performed regularly and excruciatingly. He was regarded by the audience as a great “card” and received a tumultuous welcome.’ There was also the already time-honoured ‘Personality Girl’ contest, won by Greta: ‘She was chosen by outside judges and the choice was unpopular with the campers. Her forwardness and general brashness were disliked – disapproved of by the elderly and resented by the young. Contestants were judged not only on their appearance, but also on their talent. (Greta’s talent consisted of singing “Too Young”.) When asked her ambition, one girl said she had already achieved it in marriage, and we were interested to note the loud applause.’ The week ended, as usual, with the Campers’ Concert. ‘For an amateur show the standard was quite high,’ the M-O team found. ‘Greta, who was accorded a tepid reception, exhibited an unexpected versatility and sang “Nevertheless”. The most popular turn was given by a boy of fifteen, who did farm-yard imitations.’ And, they added in a reference to the radio programme on the BBC in the 1940s, moving to Radio Luxembourg in the 1950s, Opportunity Knocks, ‘his performance was better than that of most of Hughie Green’s discoveries’.11

  Everywhere, this sixth summer after Labour’s landslide victory, the welfare state was in daily, ubiquitous action. ‘There were medicine bottles of orange juice and jars of Virol to pick up from the baby clinic for my sister,’ Carolyn Steedman recalled about moving in June as a four-year-old from Hammersmith to Streatham Hill. Or take the experience of a nine-year-old living with her mother and stepfather in a converted railway carriage at Wraysbury in Berkshire. ‘The school health inspector said that I was too skinny, and that I was suffering from malnutrition,’ Christine Keeler remembered. ‘He arranged for me to be sent to a holiday home in Littlehampton to be fattened up for a month. When I arrived there were sixteen boys staying, but no girls. We were all skinny as rakes. We bathed and played ping-pong and one of the older boys taught me how to play chess.’ ‘It was,’ she added, ‘the first time I felt myself aware of a boy.’

  For most adults, it was still quite hard just getting by. ‘What is the main problem facing you and your family at the present time?’ asked Gallup in July. Fifty-six per cent replied that it was the cost of living. Nevertheless, as the very worst of the immediate post-war austerity became a memory, things were continuing to ease somewhat – but only somewhat – in the shops. ‘We went for the meat,’ noted Nella Last in mid-August. ‘I got best frying steak for 1½ rations, & stewing steak for 1½ books, and was lucky enough to get a kidney too.’ Later that month, Judy Haines in Chingford was similarly grateful: ‘Meat ration much increased [to 1s 10d worth, the highest for ten years] and I have steak as well as a joint this week.’ Soon afterwards, on Saturday, 1 September, there was an important symbolic event, with the opening in bombed-out Plymouth of the new Dingle’s, the old one having been destroyed in an air raid. It was the first big department store to have been completed in the country since 1939, and some 40,000 eager shoppers visited on the first day. ‘Nylons were the main object of the early arrivals,’ reported the Western Morning News as a queue quickly formed at the hosiery counter ‘and at one time snaked through several departments on the ground floor’. In the crowded food hall, ‘the grocery counters were besieged’. Tellingly, ‘women who had secured the goods they required then stopped to admire a refrigerated window full of meat’.

  That same day, in the Dorset parish of Loders and Dottery, there took place the annual gymkhana, held in the park of Loders Court. ‘The Gymkhana was good for our souls,’ the Rev. Oliver Willmott wrote in due course in his Parish Notes:

  In previous years the weather had always smiled on us, and we sometimes wondered how we would face up to it if the weather frowned. Now we know. Rain fell mercilessly most of the morning and afternoon, but the competitors turned up, some of them from a distance, and ‘the show must go on’ became the order of the day. The entries reached the surprising number of 87, and this encourages the supposition that fine weather would have made the day eminently successful. The cosiest spot on that boggy field was Mrs Harry Legg’s tea emporium under the cedar tree. There the sweetest smiles of herself and her bevy of lady helpers atoned for the rain. The eyes of many customers turned to her warm stove, but it could not be come at for the ice-cream man, who seemed glued to it . . .12

  ‘We listened to Mr Attlee’s political party broadcast,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton on 19 September. ‘It turned out to be an announcement of an Election on Oct 25th. Dear, I hope this crew doesn’t get in again. That would be awful. I can’t vote Tory, but I would prefer the Tories in.’ For several months Attlee had been coming under sustained pressure from King George – to the effect that if there was going to be an election, it had better be sooner rather than later, so that it was out of the way before he began a lengthy Commonwealth tour in early 1952. Attlee, who felt an intense personal allegiance to the King, had eventually given in, informing the monarch on 5 September of the election timetable. By the time of the election announcement a fortnight later, however, there was a new, unforeseen twist. ‘The King seems very ill,’ Raynham added in her entry. ‘Has nine doctors.’ Four days later he was under the knife, as another diarist, Gladys Hague (in her mid-fifties, living with her sister in Keighley), recorded: ‘King George VI has had a serious lung operation so everyone is anxious.’ But by now it was too late to reverse the decision, and an election on 25 October it was going to be.

  ‘It certainly seems very strange that the P.M. shd have launched the Election at this moment,’ reflected Harold Macmillan the day after the three-hour operation for the removal of a lung. ‘What will happen if the King dies?’ The larger question was whether Attlee needed to call an election at all. It is true that his parliamentary majority of only six had become increasingly frayed at the edges over the summer, with the Tories using every device to keep the Commons sitting for unconscionable hours – so much so that half a century later Roy Jenkins recalled 1951 as ‘the most burdensome summer of all my thirty-four years in the House’.13 Even so, the Labour government probably could have carried on into 1952, waiting for the adverse economic effects of the Korean War to lessen; but Attlee was weary, his ministers were weary, and to someone like Attlee the appeal of a clear-cut resolution to a difficult, unsatisfactory situation would have been considerable.

  The Prime Minister himself exuded reassurance and steady-as-she-goes during the three weeks of the campaign. ‘He is sincere, straightforward, clear, concise, sometimes witty, and on rare occasions angry in a dignified kind of way,’ observed one reporter, Ian Mackay, in the cours
e of following him around the country (as usual driven by his wife Vi). ‘His great strength is his sincerity and simplicity.’ In policy terms, though, there was on the part of both Attlee and his party a palpable sense of exhaustion, with little being offered for the future that was either new or exciting – and certainly no specific promise of any further extension of public ownership, with instead only a vague reference in the manifesto to how ‘we shall take over concerns which fail the nation’. Instead, there was a twofold emphasis: domestically, on the welfare and employment gains since the war, invariably compared to the ‘hungry’ 1930s; and internationally, partly in the context of difficult current situations in the Middle East, on depicting the Tories, above all Churchill, as warmongers. The latter theme was especially highlighted by the strongly Labour-supporting Daily Mirror, whose insistent question, ‘Whose Finger on the Trigger?’, passed into electoral folklore.

  ‘You have to make up your minds,’ William Warbey, Labour’s candidate in Luton, told his listeners as he toured the Farley Hill Estate just over a fortnight before polling day. ‘Which sort of government is more likely to safeguard peace, maintain full employment and preserve fair shares for the ordinary working man and woman of this country? Would you trust a Tory Government to keep this country out of war? I wouldn’t.’ And later that afternoon, addressing a crowd of women, he added: ‘We don’t want a great man of war like Churchill, we want a man of peace like Attlee.’ Later that Wednesday, Aneurin Bevan was in the nearby, equally marginal Watford constituency, where he spoke at the town hall ‘filled to capacity, with people standing even at the back of the gallery’ and, at one point, a scuffle breaking out after someone shouted ‘Vermin’. Inevitably the NHS was a focal part of his speech: ‘The Service introduced a conception of ethical priorities, said Mr Bevan. “Rubbish,” shouted a heckler. “It’s no good shouting ‘Rubbish’,” rapped out Mr Bevan. “We have now converted the Tory Party to it!” ’14 The sitting MP was John Freeman, who in the spring had, with Harold Wilson, followed Bevan by resigning over the question of charges for dentures and spectacles. But even though the Labour conference at Scarborough at the start of October had seen a clear upsurge of party members’ support for what were becoming known as ‘the Bevanites’, a firm lid was successfully kept on internal differences during the campaign.

  Crucial to the Labour case was the contrast between past immiserisation and present amelioration. ‘The Last of the Sandwich-Men’ was the title of a Kenneth Allsop piece in Picture Post some six months before the election. ‘It’s a depth that some men still plumb, but bit by bit that depth is being levelled up,’ he wrote. ‘The process that in the past turned human beings into sandwich-men is no longer regarded as inexorable. Already the sandwich-man has the stamp of a relic, a sad survivor of an age we’ve grown out of.’ Such an assumption was fortified during the election by the publication on 15 October of Poverty and the Welfare State, the fruits of a recent (October 1950) survey undertaken in York of more than 2,000 families. The authors, B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, found that whereas in a comparable survey in 1936 nearly one-third of that city’s working-class population had been in poverty, now it was just one-fortieth. ‘By far the greatest part of the improvement since 1936 has been due to the welfare legislation introduced since 1945,’ Lavers declared in an accompanying newspaper article, which ended with a bold, unambiguous claim: ‘To a great extent poverty has been overcome by the Welfare State.’ Unsurprisingly, the report was, in the words of David Butler (in the first of his magisterial series of election surveys), ‘eagerly seized on by the Labour Party as impartial and irrefutable evidence of their general thesis about the benefits of their rule, and it was often quoted by their speakers, particularly in answer to hecklers’. But perhaps it was not really such good news. Not only has a recent detailed study of the Rowntree/Lavers findings significantly downgraded the sharpness of poverty reduction between 1936 and 1950 (suggesting that nearly 12 per cent of working-class households were still in poverty), but the very fact of a widespread perception that poverty was a thing of the past implied that a central part of Labour’s historic mission had been completed.15

  The exact nature of the Tory mission for the 1950s and beyond was still unclear. The day after the election was announced, Churchill’s physician Lord Moran brought him some notes on the Health Service. ‘He put them in his pocket without reading them,’ Moran recorded. ‘“We don’t want detail,” he protested impatiently. “We propose to give the people a lighthouse, not a shop window.”’ In practice, moderation and circumspection were the keynotes for Churchill and his colleagues. One rising young Tory politician, David Eccles, may have told Harold Nicolson at a Spectator lunch in early October that, in the face of the difficult economic situation, ‘the only cure is to “release the pound” and remove all exchange controls’, but no such ultra-free-market nostrums appeared in Britain Strong and Free, in effect the Tory manifesto. Instead, stress was laid on improving but not replacing the NHS; keeping intact most of the nationalised industries; promising to ‘consult the leaders of the Trade Union movement on economic matters and discuss with them fully, and sympathetically, any proposals we or they may have for action on labour problems’; and holding fast to the previously announced target of building 300,000 houses a year. It was telling that in her Dartford election address, Margaret Roberts (about to marry Denis Thatcher) significantly toned down the right-wing fundamentalism that had characterised much of her previous election campaign, while in Barnet the instinctively more consensual – and Keynesian – Reggie Maudling declared without a qualm: ‘I do not think we shall have any serious argument with our opponents over the question of employment,’ that indeed ‘the difficulty today is not to find jobs for people, but people for jobs.’16

  Even so, there was still a far from minuscule difference between the pitches of the two main parties. Britain Strong and Free included a key passage about the safeguarding of ‘our traditional way of life’ as integral to ‘the Conservative purpose’: ‘A worthwhile society cannot be established by Acts of Parliament and Government planning. Adequate rewards for skill and enterprise and for the creation of wealth, belief that saving and investment are worthwhile, diffusion of property, home ownership, the rule of law, the independence of the professions, the strength of the family, personal responsibility and the rights of the individual – these are the true foundations of a free society.’ The implications were clear enough: a smaller state, fewer controls, lower taxes. ‘Queuetopia’ remained Churchill’s central metaphor for socialism in action – a term designed specifically to appeal to housewives. ‘We are for the ladder,’ he declared in his election broadcast. ‘Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait in his place till his turn comes.’

  Perhaps most symbolic of the divide was the question of identity cards. These had been introduced during the war, and the peacetime Labour government had shown no inclination to abolish them. Earlier in the year there had been a cause célèbre after Harry Willcock, a businessman who had twice stood as a Liberal parliamentary candidate, had refused to produce his after being stopped by the police for driving too fast along Ballards Lane in Finchley. Willcock eventually lost his appeal in the High Court, but the British Housewives’ League held a well-publicised protest outside Parliament, with ID cards being ceremoniously destroyed. The issue did not specifically feature in the Tory manifesto, but everyone knew that a change of government would see the unmourned end of what Sir Ernest Benn (publisher, libertarian and uncle of Tony) liked to call ‘the Englishman’s badge of servitude’.17

  As usual there was a round of election broadcasts, which overall were listened to by 36 per cent of the adult population – down two points on the previous year. ‘The “higher” the class the greater the listening,’ noted the BBC, while even among working-class listeners there was a significantly higher take-up for Conservative than Labour speakers. Churchill this time round, six years after his ‘Gestapo’ fiasco, gave
a masterly broadcast, presenting himself as a national figure above the squalid political fray. ‘We shall endanger our very existence if we go on consuming our strength in bitter party or class conflicts,’ he declared. ‘We need a period of several years of solid stable administration by a government not seeking to rub party dogma into everybody else.’ As in 1950, the ‘Radio Doctor’, Charles Hill, was a star performer for the Tories. ‘He is very clever,’ commented Vere Hodgson. ‘I like his – “will Mr Attlee take the ermine and leave Bevan to deal with the vermin?” ’ But in Brixton the morning after there was frustration, with a neighbour telling Florence Speed that she really should have listened to Dr Hill. ‘But as I told him,’ she noted with some bitterness, ‘T.V. has cut radio out in our house.’

  On the small screen itself, the only election coverage was a live broadcast by each party, with the Tory turn falling on the same evening (the 16th) as Hill. Leslie Mitchell, one of television’s most reassuring presences, interviewed the would-be foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, in a live, seemingly spontaneous dialogue that had in fact been meticulously rehearsed. A passage towards the end gives the fearless, take-no-prisoners flavour of the interrogation:

  Mitchell: I wonder whether I may introduce a question which I’m sure will infuriate you, but since I’m here, presumably, for that reason . . . It has often been said in recent times that the Conservative Party is a war-mongering party. Is there a shred of truth in that, or isn’t there?