Overall, it was not a place that much commended itself to a political class bent on ever-wider social and cultural improvement. ‘Blackpool, with its ugliness and high prices, is the supreme example of the commercial exploitation of working-class limitations,’ declared the New Statesman’s ‘Critic’ after the Labour Party’s 1949 conference there:
All the pleasures of a big industrial city have been concentrated on a stretch of Lancashire coast where sea-bathing is almost impossible, trees find it difficult to survive, and beauty is excluded by every device of man’s contriving. The only noble feature of the place is the trams, which are handsome and very fast. Walking on the sea-front in the evening you can see the mountains of Cumberland a few miles to the north, and reflect on what Cyril Joad [the well-known radio philosopher] has called the ‘drainage system’ which preserves the quiet of our countryside by canalising working-class holiday-makers into places like Blackpool and Southend, where their year’s savings are painlessly removed from their pockets in a few days.
Still, at least it was not Blackpool’s rival further up the coast. ‘I have just got back from Morecambe,’ Clement Attlee told his brother after the party’s conference there three years later. ‘Architecturally it ranks a good second to Blackpool, the former beats it in the atrocious ugliness of its buildings, but Morecambe pulls up on complete absence of planning. Our hotel wing was, however, very comfortable.’
Broadly speaking – with going abroad effectively not an option in terms of either affordability or available foreign currency – the British holiday-maker took what he got. Some July 1951 vox pop, ‘picked at random’ by the local Blackpool paper from ‘the crowds on central promenade’, suggested a fairly high degree of satisfaction:
This is the fourth year we have come. We like your ballrooms and swimming pools, they are so lovely. We can’t think of anything we don’t like. Blackpool to us is just wonderful. (Audrey Milburn and Jean Stanley, 20-year-old unmarried girls from Shepherd’s Bush)
The big thing about Blackpool is that when it rains there are plenty of places to go. There are lovely entertainments without going to the sideshows on Central Beach. (Mrs P. Anderson of Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, on her second visit in two years)
Blackpool has some lovely walks, that’s what I like about it. I don’t like drinking but I do like to pop in and have a pot and continue my walk. (Mr J. J. Murray, 64, of Bishop Auckland, Co Durham, who had started coming to Blackpool with his father before the Great War)
There is only one Blackpool, but I do feel that the prices of things for the children – toy windmills, buckets and spades, and other things for the sands – are sometimes high. A charge of 1s 9d for a toy windmill is, to my mind, too big. (Mr I. Blackwood, of New Cumnock, Ayrshire, with his wife on their first holiday since their wedding two years earlier)
You can have a quiet holiday or a gay one. It caters for everyone – and the air is so wonderful. (Mr and Mrs W. Hallas, of Eastmoor, Wakefield)
More generally, not just in Blackpool, it seems that two criteria mattered most to holiday-makers. The first, articulated in September 1951 by a Reynolds News reader (‘J. F.’ of Carlton Vale, London NW6), was value for money:
My wife, two children and I went to Ramsgate.
BOUQUETS:
To a landlady for perfect digs, spotless rooms, good food, moderate charges within anybody’s reach (I am a postman). To kind, courteous townspeople and shop assistants. To reduced prices for children at cinemas.
BRICKBATS:
A large one to the corporation for charging 2d for the lifts from beach to promenade, with additional charges for prams and bathchairs.
A second big one for the number of slot machines out of order (children lose shillings a week), three charges a day for deck chairs, and the prices for so-called children’s amusements.
The other criterion was wet-weather facilities, with Blackpool clearly an exception rather than the rule. ‘On a wet day what has Morecambe to offer?’ a disgruntled Mr W. Dixon of Halifax rhetorically asked a local reporter in August 1951. ‘I went for a walk on Sunday morning and saw visitors crowding into every available inch of shelter. They all looked miserable, and cast anxious looks towards the sky . . .’ Soon afterwards Arnold Russell, having completed his tour of seaside resorts, echoed the complaint: ‘In Scarborough and Margate, South Wales and Hastings, I saw families soaked to the skin, staring hopelessly at emptying grey skies, fervently wishing they were home again. Disappointed youngsters had become fractious, mother was near a nervous breakdown, and Dad was ready to emigrate – on his own.’ For these unhappy families, he added, there was ‘no option but to trail back to an already overcrowded boarding house, to a landlady who didn’t want them while she did her cleaning and cooking’.49
‘There are queues for everything,’ Russell at the start of the August Bank Holiday weekend had reported from Margate, widely acknowledged as the Blackpool of the south and a particular magnet for holiday-making Midlanders. ‘For cinemas and theatres, for milk bars and pubs, at ice-cream kiosks and at whelk stalls . . .’ Nowhere was more crowded than Dreamland, ‘jammed with hilarious holiday-makers finding out if the Butler really did see what he wasn’t supposed to, pouring thousands of pennies into every kind of amusement machine, shrieking themselves into hysteria on giant dippers and whirling cars, and capping every thrill with an endless succession of plates of cockles’. What exactly was Dreamland? An advertisement in June 1953 extolled its Amusement Park (‘open all day and every day’, featuring ‘Europe’s newest thrill – the giant Sky Wheel’), its illuminated Magic Garden and fully licensed Swiss Beer Garden (‘A Five-Acre Enchanted Fairyland’), and its cinema, ballroom and Sunshine Theatre (mainly for Variety).
It was probably later that summer in Margate that Lindsay Anderson shot his 11-minute O Dreamland, eventually shown in 1956 as one of the pioneering Free Cinema films. Against a soundtrack alternating between the canned laughter of a mechanical dummy policeman and a jukebox playing two of 1953’s big hits – Frankie Laine’s ‘I Believe’ and Muriel Smith’s ‘Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me’ – he produced a social document of, in Gavin Lambert’s fine analysis, ‘a deep, already troubled ambivalence’:
The candid camerawork, mainly in close shot, shows faces reacting to everything with the same almost catatonic lack of expression. A child blinks at Rosenberg strapped in the electric chair [a macabre recreation of the execution of the atom spy], a tired elderly woman slurps tea as she stares at an ‘artistic’ nude statue, Bingo players intone the numbers after the caller, like churchgoers mechanically repeating the Lord’s Prayer after the minister. The camera also explores other body parts, feet shuffling across ground fouled with litter, tremendous buttocks spilling over counter stools. There is no spoken commentary, only an implied unanswered question: If this is Dreamland, what kind of nightmare is everyday life?
Sometimes the crowd seems as ugly and mindless as the lunatic cackling dummy, sometime as pathetically trapped as the lion in its cage . . .50
Was this deal – for people’s precious spare time – enough? Were they happy? Or just resigned? For better or worse, O Dreamland marked the start of a new, increasingly high-profile phase in the long, difficult, love–hate relationship of the left-leaning cultural elite with the poor old working class, just going about its business and thinking its own private, inscrutable thoughts.
9
I’ve Never Asked Her In
Before slum clearances and high-rise, before affluence, before mass immigration, before social mobility, before the spread of car ownership and the ubiquitous coming of the box in the corner – was there that most precious, most elusive thing we call ‘community’? Ricky Tomlinson, recalling in 2003 his working-class Liverpool childhood in the 1940s and early to mid-1950s, seemingly had no doubt that, notwithstanding the city’s Protestant/Catholic sectarianism, such a thing truly existed on the most local, intimate scale:
No one was rich and no one was poor in Lance Street. We were
all in the same leaky boat – struggling to make ends meet . . .
Everyone knew everyone in Lance Street. No doors were ever locked. You just knocked and walked in. The street was just wide enough for two cars to pass although I can’t remember ever seeing two cars in the street at the same time.
There were around sixty houses and most had children. I can name virtually every family. The Flemmings had seven boys and the Muskers seven girls. Then there were the Taggarts, Moores, Bains and Jennings . . .
In the long twilights we played catch and chase games on the street like ‘Tic’ and ‘Alalio’. Most of the boys had wooden tommy guns or sometimes the real thing, with the firing pin removed. These had been bought for a couple of coppers after the war when fellas would come round the streets with handcarts selling old rifles.
Every 5 November the pride of Lance Street was at stake. A huge bonfire blocked the road, built from wood that had been stockpiled for weeks. Floorboards were ripped out of bombdies [ie bombed-out houses] and packing crates were broken down. Anything we couldn’t scrounge we stole, organising raids on neighbouring streets . . .
‘Lance Street no longer exists,’ he added. ‘Nor do the short cuts, hiding places and most of the landmarks from my childhood. Heyworth Primary is now a recreational park full of drug addicts on the dark nights and there is no Garrick pub or Everton Picture Palace. All the houses and shops were bulldozed in the sixties when Liverpool City Council decided that the two-up-two-downs were slum housing . . .’
Over the years there have been many accounts like Tomlinson’s, prompting one exasperated historian, Joanna Bourke, to argue in 1994 that the very term ‘working-class community’ needs to be approached with the greatest suspicion, given the cumulative weight of largely romantic ‘working-class autobiographies and oral histories, where social relations are often recalled through a golden haze: conflict is forgotten in favour of doors that were always open; the neighbour who was never seen is neglected in favour of the neighbour who always shared; tiring workdays are ignored in favour of nearly forgotten games which diverted children even during difficult times’. Equally culpable in her eyes have been generations of socialists, for whom the concept of ‘community’ has ‘represented the innate socialism of the workers’ – in essence, she asserts, ‘a rhetorical device’ rather than objective, empirical description.
Another historian, Robert Colls, strongly takes issue with Bourke’s overall claim that communities are retrospective constructs. In his superbly crafted 2004 essay ‘When We Lived in Communities’, he evokes the sense of community he experienced himself, especially through the forceful street presence of strong-minded women, as a boy (born 1949) in working-class South Shields. Colls also repudiates Bourke’s argument that the working-class neighbourhood was (in his paraphrasing words) ‘essentially a contracting society, bidding for scarce commodities and resources’, a view he sees as part of the Thatcher-era turn against traditional class-and-community collective history in favour of the concerns of ‘a post-industrial, post-colonial, post-masculine, post-Christian world of fluid identities, ethnic diversities and global markets’. And he places much long-term emphasis on how, going back to the nineteenth century, the working class had built and then maintained ‘an entirely new civil society based on free association’, including involvement in a whole range of voluntary institutions.
Clearly there is no alternative but to go back to contemporary sources to try to resolve the matter. What, though, does ‘community’ – that ‘warmly persuasive word’, as Raymond Williams would call it in 1976 – actually mean? As early as 1955 a sociologist listed 94 major ways of defining a ‘community’. But here, on commonsensical rather than theoretical grounds, three criteria will suffice for consideration: the extent to which people living in the same locality did indeed engage in associational activity; the extent to which they positively identified with the place where they lived; and the extent to which relations between them were conducted on a basis of friendliness, trust and mutuality.1
Beyond the pub, the working-men’s club and, arguably, the football or rugby-league terrace and perhaps the bowling green, it is difficult – to judge by the sociological fieldwork of the day – to discern outside the workplace a particularly rich or thriving associational life in working-class Britain of the late 1940s and early 1950s, a Britain in which the coming of the welfare state had sharply reduced the need for collective forms of self-help such as the friendly societies.
‘The leisure time of Coseley people is predominantly spent in informal social activity within the family group,’ Doris Rich found in the Black Country, adding that apart from the pub and the club there was ‘no strongly felt need for more public facilities’. Mark W. Hodges and Cyril S. Smith, two social scientists studying a Sheffield housing estate built between the wars, reckoned that ‘for the most part more passive forms of entertainment preponderate’ and that ‘on the whole spare time is spent at the cinema, the public house, and the “dogs” ’; furthermore, ‘except for visits to the public house, there appears to be little evidence that the housewives take part regularly in social activities outside the home’. They also told the sad story of the estate’s community centre, defunct – like the garden guild and the tenants’ association – from lack of interest. Similarly, in the rundown St Ebbe’s district of Oxford, John Mogey found that only 10 per cent of his sample ‘actually said they had joined a voluntary society, or had become members of an informal group’, despite apparently ample opportunities – with Mogey ascribing ‘the loyalty of the normal person to the family hearth’ to ‘social insecurity’ in what most people believed to be ‘a hostile and dangerous world’. It was even starker in Liverpool’s ‘Ship Street’, where Madeline Kerr bluntly titled one of her sections ‘Lack of Associations’, noting that ‘the men have work associations but the women have nothing’.
Easily the fullest survey of associational life is the Derby one of 1953. Defining associational activity in terms of membership of clubs or societies, a full range of such activity was undeniably available in this medium-sized city: social clubs (including working-men’s clubs), fraternal orders (eg the Royal Ancient Order of Buffaloes), women’s clubs and institutes, youth clubs, old people’s clubs, Service and ex-Service associations, nationality clubs (eg the Welsh Society), sports clubs, recreational clubs, horticultural associations, hobbies clubs, film societies, dramatic societies, music and choral societies, art clubs, literary clubs, photographic societies, archaeological, historical and geographical associations, scientific societies, educational associations, religious and church clubs, business and professional clubs, political clubs, international associations (eg the United Nations Association) and welfare associations. ‘Subscriptions – where they exist at all – are generally so low as to present an obstacle to few people,’ noted the authors. ‘It is fair to say that most of this wide range of club activities is open to all who might wish to take part.’ The sample comprised 1,200 men and women aged between 16 and 69, and these were the key findings about the number of clubs or societies joined:
None 1 2 3 or more
% % % %
Men 38 38 15 9
Women 67 22 6 5
Middle-class 42 30 14 14
Working-class 58 29 9 4
Neither age nor marital status made much difference – certainly by comparison with both gender and class. Predictably, the survey also found that ‘the most popular type of club is the social club’, usually ‘for drinking purposes’, but there was no doubt about what were the two most striking revelations: namely, that 67 per cent of women (predominantly working-class women, given that the sample broadly reflected Derby’s strongly working-class character) belonged to no clubs or associations; and that 58 per cent of working-class people (men and women) likewise belonged to none.2 In short, the evidence is overwhelming that working-class associational life in Derby (a not atypical place) was at best patchy – and certainly not rich.
What about identity with pl
ace? ‘Coseley isn’t bad, I’m used to it,’ ‘Coseley is all right for them’s bred and born there,’ and (from a man who never went away on holiday) ‘Coseley is as healthy as anywhere else’ were some representative sentiments quoted by Rich, who reckoned that Coseley natives ‘had a very strong local patriotism’ – even though ‘those who had come to Coseley from elsewhere more often expressed the opinion that “it’s the last place on God’s earth” or “it needs an atom bomb” ’. It was much the same in Bethnal Green, or at least among the elderly who in about 1955 filled 11 coaches and went to Brighton for the day. ‘We’re from good old Bethnal Green,’ bystanders were told, as (in an observer’s words) ‘the 400 made their way, in slow-moving groups, to the end of the central pier’. Richard Hoggart, in his part-reminiscence, part-reportage of Hunslet in The Uses of Literacy (1957), asserted that the focus of loyalty was a much smaller ‘tribal area’, recalling how by the age of ten he and his Hunslet contemporaries knew ‘both the relative status of all the streets around us and where one part shaded into another’, so that ‘our gang fights were tribal fights, between streets or groups of streets’ – an experience very similar to Tomlinson’s in Liverpool. But loyalty could also be to a whole city, or even a region, according to Bill Lancaster’s powerful if debatable reading of Newcastle, where (for him) ‘Geordie’ identity has historically trumped class identity.
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 27