Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  What did the people want? ‘The Parties have got sponsoring all wrong,’ Hugh Cudlipp, soon to become the dynamic Editorial Director of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Pictorial, told Crossman shortly after the Commons vote. ‘The staunchest Tory supporters are all against it but a large number of people who vote Labour would really like sponsored variety programmes.’ Crossman himself reflected: ‘I’m sure that this is true in Coventry [his constituency], where most of my supporters would love sponsored programmes.’ Although Gallup found opinion evenly divided – roughly one-third in favour of a new television channel sponsored by advertisers, one-third against, one-third undecided – the instincts of Cudlipp and Crossman were surely correct. Morrison may have worried that television was something ‘we can have too much of’, claiming that ‘when listening and looking it is impossible for anyone to work or read, although women can knit’, but almost invariably once people started watching they were hooked – and wanted more. ‘I am very interested in television as a viewer,’ an engine-driver member of the BBC’s Viewing Panel wrote in during the spring. ‘It must have altered the habits of thousands of working people, as it has mine. It has opened a vista of sights scenes and educational items to which we could never have aspired. I no longer listen to radio, I rarely go out in the evenings, I have visited the cinema once in 18 months.’ He added a postscript: ‘I have also resigned my seat on the Town Council, and politics.’9

  One of the new medium’s great attractions, of course, was its coverage (though still somewhat patchy) of major sporting events. In a memorable Derby, the 16-year-old Lester Piggott was ruthlessly outmanoeuvred by the veteran Charlie Smirke on Tulyar, the triumphant winning jockey taunting Piggott by saying, ‘What did I Tulyar?’ as he dismounted; in the First Test at Headingley against India, England took the field under its first-ever professional captain, Len Hutton, who had a formidable weapon in his fiery fast bowler Fred Trueman – rugged, quick-tongued, no lover of the old guard; and in the Olympics at Helsinki, just as it seemed that Britain was going to go home without a gold medal, Colonel Harry Llewellyn jumped a clear round on Foxhunter, best-loved British horse of the era. There were other entertainments available in August. Churchill one evening went to see The Yeomen of the Guard at Streatham and, according to ‘Jock’ Colville, who accompanied him, ‘was received with immense acclamation by the audience’; the American singer Frankie Laine was an instant sell-out at the London Palladium, though an unimpressed Tynan noted in his review how ‘he spreads his arms out like a wrestler, and then hits a mad, toneless head-note, holding it so long that you expect him to drop like a stone at the end of it’; and the northern comedian Frank Randle continued to break all records at the Central Pier, Blackpool, with his twice-nightly Randle’s Summer Scandals. It was not, though, a trouble-free summer for Randle, long the target of Blackpool’s Chief Constable Harry Barnes, a strong Methodist. Eventually, Barnes got him summonsed on four charges of obscenity, with the police identifying the part of the show they objected to:

  A silent Chinaman shuffled across the stage. Randle asked the audience, ‘Is that King Farouk?’

  CINDERELLA, to Buttons (Randle): ‘I’d like to do you a favour.’

  BUTTONS: ‘A’d rather have a boiled egg.’

  And CINDERELLA again: ‘I’d like to talk to you.’

  BUTTONS: ‘It’s nowt to do with me. It’ll be me father agin.’

  And finally, ‘There’s a flea loose in the harem and the favourite will have to be scratched.’

  Found guilty on all counts, Randle was fined £10 on each summons, with fines also for the rest of the cast and the theatre manager.10

  There was one dreadful natural disaster during the summer. ‘Deaths about 30 [in the end 34] in Lynmouth, the holiday makers and the villagers equally in flood,’ recorded Harold Macmillan on Sunday, 17 August, after a deluge had broken over Exmoor. ‘Apparently this happened on Friday night, but was not in Saturday’s newspapers. As we never listen to the wireless, I had not heard the BBC account on Saturday night.’ Over the next few days the BBC, the press and the newsreels all gave blanket coverage to the tragedy, though Churchill was not deterred from going to his Gilbert and Sullivan on Monday evening. By then Macmillan, as Housing Minister, was in north Devon, where he spent Tuesday morning surveying the spectacular damage and persuading the locals ‘to concentrate on getting immediate work done before arguing as to exactly who is to pay’. Although criticised in some quarters for his extravagant language (‘like the road to Ypres’) and dress (cloth cap and walking stick), Macmillan himself believed that his visit had been ‘very well received’.11

  Soon afterwards, in early September, Raymond Chandler arrived in London for a month’s stay. There were some pleasingly Chandleresque touches in his letters back home. ‘Today is an English Sunday and by God it’s gloomy enough for a crossing of the Styx,’ he told his publisher. ‘I thought England was broke but the whole damn city is crawling with Rolls Royces, Bentleys, Daimlers and expensive blondes.’ And, no doubt reflecting the cuisine at the Connaught, he added: ‘Never thought I’d get sick of the sight of a grouse on toast or a partridge, but by God I am.’ Even so, by the time he got back to California and sent his report to his old Dulwich College contemporary Bill Townend, his overall verdict was favourable: ‘The present generation of English people impressed me very well. There is a touch of aggressiveness about the working classes and the non-Public School types which I think is something new and which I personally do not find at all unpleasant . . . And the real Public School types, or many of them, with their bird-like chirpings are becoming a little ridiculous.’

  There was nothing sanguine about ‘Love is Dead’, the opening essay of John Betjeman’s First and Last Loves, a mainly architectural collection published in September. ‘We are told that we live in the age of the common man,’ he declared:

  He would be better described as the suburban man. There is a refinement about him which pervades everything he touches and sees. His books are chosen for him by the librarian, his arguing is done for him by Brains Trusts, his dreams are realised for him in the cinema, his records are played for him by the B.B.C. . . . He collects facts as some collect stamps, and he abhors excess in colour, speech or decoration. He is not vulgar. He is not the common man, but the average man, which is far worse.

  He is our ruler and he rules by committees. He gives us what most people want, and he believes that what is popular is what is best. He is the explanation of such phenomena as plastic tea-cups, Tizer, light ale, quizzes, mystery tours, cafeterias, discussion groups, Chapels of Unity, station announcers . . .

  As for what the future held under this rule of the mediocre, Betjeman offered a startlingly uncuddly, dystopian vision:

  I see the woman with a scarf twisted round her hair and a cigarette in her mouth. She has put the tea tray down upon the file on which my future depends. I see the man on the chain-belt feeling tired, not screwing the final nuts. In a few months I see the engine falling out of the motor car. I see eight porters, two postmen and an inspector standing dazed for forty minutes on a provincial station, staring into space and waiting for what was once the Great Western which is now forty minutes late. I see those sharp-faced girls behind the buffet and the counter insulting the crowds who come to buy. Too bored to think, too proud to pray, too timid to leave what they’re used to doing . . . We know how many tons of coal are produced per week, how many man-hours there are in a pair of nylons, the exact date and the name of the architect and the style of a building. The Herr-Professor-Doktors [ie Pevsner] are writing everything down for us, sometimes throwing in a little hurried pontificating too, so we need never bother to feel or think or see again. We can eat our Weetabix, catch the 8.48, read the sports column and die; for love is dead.

  ‘One of the most savage Jeremiads on English life today that I have ever read,’ thought the architectural writer (and semi-Modernist) John Summerson. ‘It is a little embarrassing.’ But to the young, aggressive, left-wing a
rt critic John Berger it was worse than that. ‘Why bother to consider the book at all?’ he asked in Tribune. ‘Because it shows, I think, how silly an imaginative and knowledgeable writer can become, if he loses touch with the real issues of the time.’

  All too late, in any case, for Mahmood Hussein Mattan – a 28-year-old Somali seaman (and father of three) hanged in Cardiff Prison on 8 September for the murder in March of Lily Volpert, a shopkeeper in the Cardiff docks area. The key prosecution witness was a carpenter called Harold Cover, subsequently convicted in 1969 of attempting to murder his own daughter. That failed to persuade the Home Secretary of the day, James Callaghan, to reopen Mattan’s case, but in 1998 the Court of Appeal did reconsider it and found that Mattan’s conviction could no longer be regarded as safe. ‘The court can only hope that its decision today will provide some crumb of comfort for his surviving relatives,’ said Lord Justice Rose. Mattan’s widow, Laura, though, was unappeased by the quashing of the conviction. ‘I’ll probably be angry until my dying day,’ she told reporters outside the court. ‘He has been cleared, but it should never have happened in the first place. He should have been cleared way back then.’12

  ‘Crikey’, ‘Yarooh’, ‘I say, you fellows’, ‘Leggo, you beasts’ – the soon familiar cries of the ‘Fat Owl of the Remove’ were first heard on television on the Tuesday after the King’s funeral. Initially, each episode of Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School was screened twice, at 5.40 for children and then at 8.00 for adults, both times performed live. Significantly, the opening episode got an excellent Reaction Index (from the BBC’s Television Panel) of 79 for the earlier performance, but only 61 for the later. ‘There was some feeling among adults that the programme lacked some of the pace and rumbustiousness they associated with the original Billy Bunter stories, and there was a minority of viewers who do not share the view that the stories were worthy of television portrayal.’ The Daily Sketch, a right-wing tabloid, was more succinct, calling the programme ‘dull, dated, boring’. But for many children it was an irresistible draw, above all when the gimlet-eyed form-master Mr Quelch (initially played by Kynaston Reeves) uttered the irresistible words, ‘Bend over, you wretched boy,’ or when Bunter’s sadistic, snooty chums (Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh) tormented their fat, nouveau-riche schoolfellow. Did it worry them that Bunter was played by a padded-out 29-year-old actor (Gerald Campion, in his forties by the time of the last series in 1961)? Or that the world of Greyfriars School – first created in 1910 in the boys’ weekly Magnet by the prolific, indefatigable Frank Richards, who now wrote the television scripts – was so infinitely removed from the experience of most children? Probably not. Back in 1940, George Orwell had famously accused Richards of snobbishness, diehard Toryism and being stuck in an Edwardian time warp. ‘Human nature, Mr Orwell, is dateless,’ Richards had replied. ‘A character that lives is always up to date.’13

  These japes at a minor public school hit the screen just as the sheep-and-goats selection system for state secondary education came for the first time under serious, dispassionate scrutiny. Philip Vernon, professor of Educational Psychology at London University’s Institute of Education, published in the Times Educational Supplement in early 1952 a two-part investigation of ‘Intelligence Testing’, based on experiments carried out under his direction. His key finding was that ‘systematic coaching’ made a significant difference to a child’s chances in the eleven-plus exam, and for several weeks the TES was flooded with letters, one of which – from James Hemming in Isleworth – castigated the prevailing system as ‘unscientific, uneducational, wasteful, unjust, and brutal’. The TES itself, in a measured editorial, noted how intelligence tests, as set in the eleven-plus, had ‘seemed a heaven-sent technique for approximating to that “equality of opportunity” which the nation is pledged to offer its children’, in that ‘the tests, it was declared, measured potentialities that were proof against the accidents of birth and early fortune’. The paper did not call, though, for their abolition as such, but rather for more emphasis in selection to be placed on ‘attainment tests’ (in English and maths) and what it called ‘scaled teachers’ estimates’. The controversy eventually reached Picture Post, though its reporter, Fyfe Robertson, embodiment of Scottish common sense, somewhat evasively concluded that ‘when we can manage to give every child the best schooling we can devise, life will do the selecting better than any mathematically-minded educational psychologist’.14

  In the early 1950s it was not just Labour Party policy that was hostile to tripartism (grammars, secondary moderns and thin-on-the-ground technical schools), but a gathering mood on the left as a whole. Typical was Wilfred Fienburgh, who argued in the New Statesman in March 1953 that there had been no advance in equal opportunity since Butler’s 1944 Act – largely because the system was too ‘chancy’, though he also emphasised the continuing existence of private education. Added to the chanciness, he declared, was an inherent cruelty: ‘We grade our material at the age of eleven when it is acutely conscious of itself as a person, is aware that parents are anxious, and is, above all, very alive to the chances of success or failure.’ Accordingly, ‘what we need are schools catering for all the children in a neighbourhood regardless of wealth or ability’. In similar vein, he called for public schools to be turned into ‘national residential sixth forms’ available to all.

  An editorial in the same issue, describing the British school system as ‘the outstanding example in the Western world of educational privilege’, supported only the first half of Fienburgh’s prescription and demanded the end of the eleven-plus: ‘It is socially pernicious. Taking the Grammar school cap is a more potent emblem of privilege than the old school tie. Public school snobbery affects a few children. The snobbery of the local Grammar school sets the tone in every city and country.’ Accordingly, the comprehensive school – of which there were precious few yet in existence – was the answer. Many Labour-controlled local education authorities (LEAs) were in fact still doubtful, even in some cases hostile, but not so the Labour majority on the education committee of the London County Council. ‘It aims neither at levelling up nor levelling down, but at giving every child full opportunity to develop according to its own ability,’ declared (in April 1952) Helen Bentwich, until recently chairman of the committee, about the LCC’s ambitious plan for comprehensives. ‘The understanding between workers by hand and brain which must exist when they are educated in the same schools is the best of all preparations for the socialist society. The comprehensive schools, as planned by the L.C.C., will be schools of which any community may rightly be proud.’

  The defence of grammars came partly from the left – ‘it’s part of the folklore of the old Labour Party that the great thing was to give our boys a chance to go to grammar schools,’ the sociologist A. H. Halsey would recall with some exasperation – but inevitably mainly from the right. A key figure was the new Education Minister, Florence Horsbrugh. Generally ineffective at resisting Treasury pressure to squeeze education spending (a particularly ill-timed squeeze given that the ‘bulge’ babies were just starting to enter the school system), she was not helped by her exclusion from the Cabinet for almost two years. Even so, for all her lack of clout and charisma, she was recognised as a conscientious minister, and in October 1952 she unambiguously told the Conservative Party Conference that she saw ‘no educational advantage in the comprehensive schools that could possibly outweigh the disadvantages in connection with their enormous size’. A motion deploring any attempt to replace tripartism with comprehensive schools was duly passed, with only one dissenter.15

  The spring-term edition of Spur, the magazine of Raynes Park County Grammar School in Surrey, offers a nice glimpse of a grammar in 1952. ‘House Notes’, written by the respective house captains, had all the usual phrases – ‘most encouraging . . . to be congratulated . . . untiring work . . . steady effort . . . cups not won by one boy alone, however brilliant he may be . . .’ – but it is the Chess Club notes, written by
a teacher, that take the eye:

  There is a regrettable tendency among juniors towards playing too much chess. The problems of playing in form rooms were partially solved by including two lunch-time meetings during the week, besides the normal Friday evening meeting. But this for some was not enough, for I have found people playing chess at any odd moment during the day in any odd corner. I welcome their enthusiasm but it must yield not only to School discipline, but also to the discipline of good chess playing. If the standard of chess in the School is to improve, players must learn from previous errors or miscalculations, and the only way to do this is to employ the discipline of thinking before you move, and that means both thinking before you make your move and thinking of what your opponent is planning. And the atmosphere of the ‘odd moment’ is not conducive to this sort of planning.

  The same teacher also regretted ‘a continued lack of original verse’ being volunteered at meetings of the Poetry Society. ‘The Society may show outward forms of prosperity,’ he reflected, ‘but the lack of original verse is a sign of serious decay.’

  Irrespective of a certain narrowness and joylessness in their pursuit of excellence, as well as making their own sheep-and-goats division at an early stage, the grammar schools were still the generally favoured destination – if only for negative reasons. ‘Teachers themselves, and particularly middle-class parents, would do almost anything to stop their children from having to go to secondary modern schools,’ D. S. Morris of the National Foundation for Education Research starkly told a meeting of the Notts Federation of Parent-Teacher Associations in April 1953. ‘As things are arranged at the moment, and speaking as a parent, I don’t blame them.’ Rosalind Delmar was one of many children for whom the pressure was truly on. In 1952 in her final year at a junior school near Redcar, mainly for the children of steelworkers, she had a mother not only soured by the experience of not having been allowed to go to secondary school herself, but also clinging to ‘her hope for a schoolteacher daughter who would look after her in her old age’. Moreover, in the school itself, ‘work was geared towards the eleven-plus with weekly tests in spelling, maths, grammar’. In the event, only four (including Delmar) passed. So too at a London primary, where in the early 1950s a young, progressively minded black teacher, Beryl Gilroy, encountered a martinet of the old school. ‘Mrs Burleigh thought I was endangering the children’s eleven-plus potential and wanted the five-year-olds streamed into good, bad and indifferent,’ she recalled in her remarkable memoir, Black Teacher (1976). ‘Her mind was hermetically sealed.’