Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  ‘Hobbies give a man something to love and something in which to find freedom,’ reckoned Ferdynand Zweig. ‘A working man has very little freedom and must often do what he dislikes. Work is often simply something which gives him a living, something he dislikes and would not do unless he is forced to it. But in his hobbies he regains his freedom . . .’ The extensive 1953 Derby sample (predominantly working-class) revealed gardening as easily the most popular male hobby, followed by (in no particular order) woodwork, decorating, cars and motorcycles, music and art, photography and animals – a list that broadly endorsed Zweig’s generalisation that for the British worker ‘handicrafts, like carpentry, toy-making, aero-modelling, leather-work, pewter-work, and so on, are much more popular than purely artistic and cultural pursuits’. As for women, the Derby sample showed knitting and needlework to be easily the most popular hobbies, followed a long way behind by gardening, music and art, reading, and rug-making. Not that everyone had a hobby: 46 per cent of the working-class element of the Derby sample had no hobby at all – 54 per cent in the case of the semi- and unskilled working class – while 38 per cent had just one hobby, and only 16 per cent had two or more hobbies. By contrast, only 31 per cent of the middle-class element of the Derby sample were – or anyway, admitted they were – hobbyless.18

  Even in the case of gardening, moreover, it was only a minority who did so on a regular basis: around seven million men and four million women. Nevertheless, it was a minority that – especially in the case of men – tended to garden on a very keen, sometimes competitive basis. ‘Growing would take every spare minute you had and you couldn’t go on holidays,’ recalled a bodymaker at Standard Motors who was also a leading member of the Coventry Chrysanthemum Society. ‘I’ve said to the wife, “Well, I’m frightened tonight, I’m going to have to fetch them in,” ’ he added about those tense, foggy times in the autumn as the 9-inch blooms matured. ‘So we’ve rolled the carpet up in the house here and I’ve had a hundred pots and I’ve had the flowers touching the ceiling. And kept ready for doing the show.’ Some working men – but in Coseley only 11 out of Rich’s sample of 112 – rented allotments, with Dennis et al in Featherstone finding holders who ‘spent so much time there as to separate themselves from their families for considerable periods’. The electrician father of Janet Bull (later Street-Porter) certainly found solace in his vegetables. ‘Like his father he liked nothing better than spending a Sunday afternoon smoking continuously while digging his allotment in Bishop’s Park,’ she remembered about her childhood in working-class Fulham. ‘He would spend hours there, tending an immaculate plot of potatoes, leeks, onions and carrots, and we were most definitely not welcome. But these home-grown vegetables helped the family budget go further . . .’

  Mr Bull’s other main leisure activities were watching speedway and football, in the latter case standing on the terraces at Craven Cottage. Again, one should not exaggerate how common a type of pursuit this was. ‘Three men and one woman in ten visit sports grounds,’ Geoffrey Gorer discovered from his massive 1950–51 People survey, ‘but for most people this is only an occasional outing.’ He also found that young men were the most regular spectators at sporting events; that ‘people in the North-East and North are far the keenest on sports, with over a quarter of the population going to sports grounds’; and that ‘members of the upper working and working classes are much the most assiduous visitors’, but that those with a weekly income below £8 ‘apparently can’t afford to spend money on sports’. Watching was one thing, playing another: according to the 1953 Derby sample, only 18 per cent of that city’s working class (with a strong bias towards the skilled worker) played sports at all, compared to 51 per cent who watched sports at all. Predictably (taking working and middle classes together), men were over twice as likely as women to play a sport and almost twice as likely to watch one.19

  Overwhelmingly the most popular spectator sport was football, watched by huge crowds in the late 1940s and early 1950s. After the all-time peak of 41.3 million people at Football League matches during the 1948–9 season, there was a gradual decline – a decline probably caused by a mixture of widening leisure as well as consumption choices and higher admission prices – but in the 1953–4 season the aggregate was still a healthy 36.2 million. Even in the League’s least-watched division, Third Division North (spiritual home of Accrington Stanley), there was an average attendance of 7,339 in the 1954–5 season. Who were the spectators? The stereotype of the cloth-capped, working-class man faithfully supporting his home-town club is not wholly off the mark, but nor is it quite the complete picture. The 1953 Derby sample revealed that 28 per cent of football-watchers were middle-class, while research by Gavin Mellor into the composition of football crowds in the north-west between 1946 and 1962 likewise suggests a significant middle-class, often car-owning element, as well as pointing to a sizeable sprinkling of out-of-towners (helped by Lancashire’s excellent, pre-Beeching rail network) and the existence of loyalties to city or region that, to an extent that would soon be inconceivable, transcended a narrowly partisan allegiance to a particular club. ‘Then [in the 1950s] it didn’t make any difference if you were a football supporter and you came from Manchester,’ recalled Dave McCormack in the 1990s. ‘If you were United you wanted United to win first and foremost, whoever they were playing, and you wanted City to be somewhere near, just below you. If you were a City supporter, you wanted City to win and United just to be perhaps two or three places below.’20

  The essence of the experience was still pretty unreconstructed: packed, often uncovered terraces, dominated by working men and their sons; primitive facilities; frequent outbursts of a great, collective roar; and, throughout the match, what Subrata Dasgupta, recalling his first childhood visit to Derby’s Baseball Ground in 1953, describes as ‘the perpetual, raucous, nerve-grinding, encouraging clamour of furiously whirling rattles’. Yet for all the noise and the endemic bad language – B. S. Johnson’s lower middle-class father, ‘normally restrained to the point of near-inarticulateness’, swore ‘with a vigour and comprehensibility which surprised and delighted me’, the novelist remembered about their trips to Stamford Bridge – these were usually sober, orderly crowds carrying little or no threat of physical violence. ‘On leaving the field at the end the referee was vociferously booed and pelted with orange peel and cigarette cartons,’ the Barnsley Chronicle unusually reported in January 1952 after a disappointing home draw with West Ham United. ‘The angry Oakwell partisans can be pardoned for their verbal action for they were placed under extreme provocation but to hurl missiles was carrying things a little too far . . .’ The actual football these crowds watched was also for the most part orderly. Intensely physical, yes – one obituary of the iron-hard Welsh centre forward Trevor Ford evoked ‘a weekly miscellany of shuddering physical confrontations frequently played on appalling pitches with a leaden ball by men wearing heavyweight footwear’ – but with an underlying honesty and lack of gamesmanship. ‘Whilst open charging and crunching tackles were seen as integral to the game, particularly in the North,’ the historian Richard Holt has noted, ‘shirt pulling, elbowing, spitting at opponents, kicking and punching off the ball and behind the referee’s back were not acceptable to most fans.’21

  It was not invariably a benign relationship between supporters and players. ‘England were now very often better in midfield play but had lost the art of shooting, particularly spontaneous shooting in the penalty area,’ asserted the FA’s Technical Sub-Committee (set up after the 1950 World Cup humiliation) in 1952. ‘This was thought to be due to the player’s reaction to the crowds, in that he feared blame if an opportunity was taken and he missed scoring.’ Or take Middlesbrough’s England defender, the handsome, well-dressed George Hardwick. ‘Ooh, Gorgeous George,’ at least one lifelong Boro fan would coo sarcastically, batting his eyelids up and down. Generally, though, this was an era of close, mutual identification. Not only did maximum-wage regulation ensure that players’ earnings were not gr
ossly out of line with those of skilled workers, but the players themselves were a visible – sometimes too visible – part of the local scene. England’s captain, Billy Wright, paid his tuppenny fare every morning to get the bus to the Wolves ground, while after a match the young Liverpool defender Ronnie Moran would join the fans on the tram home, ‘so if I’d played a stinker I’d slouch down in the front seat with a cloth cap pulled down over my face’.22

  A notable quartet suggests the strength of the relationship. Tom Finney, the gifted but also modest and loyal Preston and England winger, was approached in 1952 by the Italian club Palermo and offered financial rewards way beyond what he was getting at Deepdale. ‘Listen to me,’ the Preston chairman, a wealthy retired housebuilder called Nat Buck, told him, ‘if tha’ doesn’t play for Preston then tha’ doesn’t play for anybody.’ Finney stayed – a victim of the archaic retain-and-transfer system that in effect made slaves out of professional footballers – and the story leaked out. ‘For some,’ recalled Finney years later, ‘I was the target of abuse, labelled a “traitor” for even considering leaving my hometown club. However, there were others, and the overwhelming majority at that, who believed I had not been given a fair crack of the whip.’ Bert Trautmann was a former German POW who signed for Manchester City in 1949 amid a torrent of abuse in the local press, not least from Jewish and Ex-Servicemen’s organisations, but gave such masterly as well as courageous displays in goal that he quickly established himself as a firm Maine Road favourite. Jackie Milburn – ‘Wor Jackie’ – was perhaps the ultimate local hero. It was not just his prowess as Newcastle’s centre forward that made him so cherished; it was also the fact of his personal background as a young miner, having been brought up in the large mining village of Ashington some 15 miles north of Newcastle, and his sheer unassuming one-of-us-ness. A history of Ashington includes a touching photo of him flanked by two boys. It was soon after he had scored the two goals to win the 1951 Cup Final that, one Sunday morning, the boys simply knocked on his door at Ellington Terrace and asked to have their picture taken with him. Stanley Matthews, perhaps inevitably, completes the quartet. The outside right’s fame by the early 1950s extended far beyond Blackpool, and he was the national footballer, guaranteeing large gates at away matches. One historian, Tony Mason, persuasively suggests three main reasons for the hold he exercised on the popular imagination during these years: his apparently unimpressive physique (‘thin body, slightly hunched shoulders, receding hair and bony knees’) made him easy for the average football-watcher to identify with; his dedication to fitness and his seeming agelessness were sources of profound admiration; and his matchless craftsmanship on the field, allied to modesty and restraint off it, made him the very epitome of the skilled, respectable working man.23 Finney, Trautmann, Milburn, Matthews: together they represented the reassuring best of what was still the people’s game.

  The other great winter sport, for much of the northern working class, was rugby league. Mount Pleasant, Batley; Wheldon Road, Castleford; Crown Flatt, Dewsbury; The Boulevard, Hull (the fishermen’s team); Craven Park, Hull Kingston Rovers (the dockers’ team); Parkside, Hunslet; Lawkholme Lane, Keighley; Hilton Park, Leigh; The Watersheddings, Oldham; Knowsley Road, St Helens; Naughton Park, Widnes; Central Park, Wigan – the very names of ground and club were a litany of a deeply entrenched, unashamedly insular sporting culture. Part of that culture was an intense, narrowly focused partisanship. When St Helens in 1948 took on the touring Australians, the response to a half-time loudspeaker request to home supporters to stop cheering every time an Australian got injured was, according to the journalist (but not yet commentator) Eddie Waring, ‘groans and derisive laughter’. So too at Post Office Road, home of Featherstone Rovers and, like most rugby-league grounds, an intimate affair, including terraced houses and their washing lines along one side. ‘Two thousand teas are thrown at t’ back o’ t’ fire’ was the semi-serious local joke about what happened on Saturday afternoon if Rovers lost, causing a near-universal loss of male appetite.

  Win or lose, every supporter worth his salt had a view. ‘I would like to pass my opinion about the state of affairs at Odsal,’ wrote ‘Northernite’ in September 1951 to his local paper about what was going wrong at Bradford Northern:

  First, if instead of going to New Zealand they had brought players of the calibre of Legard (Dewsbury to Leigh), White (Wigan to Halifax), Poole (Hull to Leeds), and Ike Owens (Castleford to Huddersfield) they would have done better.

  Secondly, every team Northern meets seems to be five yards faster in the first ten yards.

  Thirdly, everybody’s half-backs put ours in the shade.

  Fourthly, forwards seem to play without plan. Very seldom do they pass the ball – just head down and trust to providence.

  And finally, it’s no use Joe Phillips kicking goals if he concedes points in his defensive play.

  Obviously what is needed is some sound coaching and really hard training.

  The game’s uncompromising, uncomplaining physical hardness was taken for granted. ‘I had my head to Mellor’s backside, waiting for the ball to come between his legs,’ begins David Storey’s novel This Sporting Life (1960), based on his experience of playing for Leeds in the early 1950s. ‘He was too slow. I was moving away when the leather shot back into my hands and, before I could pass, a shoulder came up to my jaw. It rammed my teeth together with a force that stunned me to blackness.’ Hard, yes, but also a game that was, in Colin Welland’s admiring words, ‘scrupulously honest, demanding total discipline and absolute commitment’ – qualities, he argues, that sprang directly from ‘the priorities and values of northern working-class life’.24

  Two of the most working-class sports were animal-based. Greyhound racing was an inter-war phenomenon that, like speedway, enjoyed a briefish golden age after the war, peaking as early as 1946, when total attendances of 30 million were not far short of football and the night of the Greyhound Derby at White City stadium coincided with no fewer than 44 race meetings on other British tracks. Floodlit, it gave the urban male working class easy access to a night out with a bit of a flutter – other London courses included Harringay, Catford, Wandsworth, Park Royal and New Cross – though even among that target group only a small, hard-core minority regularly attended, caught for ever by the marvellous closing sequence of The Blue Lamp, filmed at White City. The other, more participative animal sport was pigeon racing. Its roots lay in the nineteenth century, but it was still thriving in the 1950s with some half-a-million fanciers, especially in the form of long-distance races such as the Great Yorkshire Amalgamation’s Caen Race, the London North Combine’s Berwick Race and the West Yorkshire Federation’s Rennes Race. It was a highly competitive sport – ‘it is safe to state that the present team represent the combination of all that was the very best of the Lulhams, Jurions, Delmottes and Wegges, fully trained for the intended onslaught upon the prizes offered within the confines of the London North Road Competition,’ ran an advertisement in February 1952 for the auction of the birds, baskets, clocks and lofts of the late Charlie Fleming – but also sociable, including (in Richard Holt’s words) ‘the trip down to the club, usually a back room of a local pub, for the synchronising of clocks, the ringing, and the filling in of forms’. Yet, as Orwell had already warned in the 1930s in The Road to Wigan Pier, there was a looming threat. ‘There seems to be a lot of trouble in places about keeping pigeons on council estates,’ Frank Sant wrote in 1952 to Racing Pigeon’s ‘North-West Jottings’ column. ‘We in Middlewich always invite the chairman, officials and a few councillors to our club dinners. There has never been any trouble here. Perhaps you would pass on the tip.’25

  In general, Zweig had no doubts on the matter. ‘Sporting events form an incessant topic of conversation with men not only in pubs and clubs, but also at home and at their works,’ he asserted in The British Worker. Moreover, he pointedly added, ‘a man who can forecast the result of an event is held in high esteem, as a win or a loss depends on his o
pinion’. Or as the Economist put it in 1947 with characteristic humanity: ‘The great support for organised gambling once came from the bored and ill-educated aristocracy; it comes today from the bored and ill-educated proletariat.’

  Betting in Britain was the title of a 1951 report by The Social Survey based on a socially representative nationwide sample. It found that ‘betting in Britain today is an almost universal habit’; that ‘more than three-quarters of the adult population go in for some form of betting’; and that, in terms of the most popular form of betting – namely horse-racing – the most regular punters were middle-aged, working-class men earning between £5 and £10 a week. Altogether, 44 per cent of the inquiry’s sample bet on major horse races, 39 per cent did the football pools, and 4 per cent bet on dog races, with in each case a bias towards men. But there were of course other popular forms of gambling. Rowntree and Lavers in their survey included pin-tables and other illegal gambling machines in amusement arcades, sweepstakes and raffles, and newspaper competitions, while an example of the way that gambling could pervade working-class culture was the working-men’s club in Middlesbrough officially called the North Eastern Club but locally always known as the Tote. ‘Its whole activity centres on gambling,’ reported M-O. ‘In it there are the bar, piano, billiard tables, and the like which typify most clubs, but as well there is a tape machine and one end of the main room is especially built with eight small hatches in the wall for placing bets, and a large blackboard near the hatches for price-marking. The bookmaker is also the club manager.’ And M-O quoted a member: ‘It’s packed here during the day, when the betting is going on. There won’t be many people in today, there’s no betting, but tomorrow and Saturday the place will be packed out, you won’t be able to move.’26