Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  ‘That Gerry Marshall’s a crafty bugger,’ she would say running her finger down the list for the third time. ‘I never ’ad two lots of bacon did I? An’ I never ’ad no biscuits this week, I know that fer a fuckin’ fact.’

  But she always paid up despite her misgivings about the bill, for to fall out with Gerry would mean no more strap and no more cash loans . . .

  If there was an element of trust, of mutual interdependence between shopkeeper and customer, in Gerry Marshall’s approach, that seems to have been less the case with Lorna Sage’s elderly relatives who ran a small general shop, Hereford Stores, in Tonypandy. ‘It was the sort of shop that had almost as many customers when it was closed as when it was open,’ she remembered. ‘Feckless, improvident types rattled at the door at all hours wanting a few fags or half a loaf. And, of course, in search of that increasingly rare commodity that was turning out to be Katie and Stan’s special stock-in-trade: tick.’ One day Stan took young Lorna on a tour of his booty. Piled up high in his loft were handlebars, wheels and seats from dismembered bicycles, wheels from prams, sometimes even whole prams, and sacks full of ivory piano keys. ‘His plan had been to confiscate people’s most vital possessions – their mobility and their music – as pledges against bad debts. They were never redeemed. Yet Stan didn’t mind, didn’t mind at all. In fact, he was as excited and pleased as if he’d invented his own currency and was a secret millionaire in it . . .’9

  Shops were not only for shopping. ‘Every day the husband meets his workmates in the factory and the canteen, and there has his social contact and his conversation,’ noted the authors of a 1953 report on Southampton’s housing estates, arguing that the New Towns had got it wrong by being unduly restrictive about shops in residential neighbourhoods. ‘For the woman whose workplace is the home, the counterpart is often the shop; and one has only to “listen in” at a “dispersed” shop to realise the intimate personal knowledge of family affairs which is shown, and the range of topics, from dress materials to local happenings, which are discussed. This adds to life something of the zest of a small community . . .’ Zest perhaps, but in shops and elsewhere the all-consuming staple of female conversation was almost invariably gossip. ‘The balconies for the tenement women were equivalent to the streets of the terraced house dwellers,’ recalled Jennifer Worth about her Poplar days. ‘So close was the living space, that I doubt if anyone could get away with anything without all the neighbours knowing. The outside world held very little interest for the East Enders, and so other people’s business was the primary topic of conversation – for most it was the only interest, the only amusement or diversion.’ Or take this reminiscence of 1940s street life in working-class Bristol:

  Monday was a real old gossip day. With so many women wielding a brush or going great guns with a polishing duster, they could pass the time of day to the neighbour over the way, or with the metal polish tins still in their hands, they would linger in little knots to discuss any recent happening in the street. Net curtains twitched as their owners peeped to see who was talking to who, and the whole street became like an Indian settlement, with gossip like smoke signals drifting in all directions.

  Some of these older working-class women could be formidable figures. ‘No-one came or went without Ma’s observation and no-one got by Ma until she had her gossip,’ began Evelyn Haythorne’s description of ‘Old Ma Barrowcliffe’, living in a fictional but true-to-life Yorkshire pit village in the early 1950s:

  Most were ready to talk, the walls were paper-thin, so they’d be daft not to, but a lot genuinely wished to share their troubles and worries. Others just passed the time of day but few willingly crossed her, for she had a great knowledge of what went off in the backs. Usually, though, she didn’t spread and one could trust Ma. If you were genuine you were all right, but she ’adn’t time for petty illnesses or for nit picking, though she had a great sympathy for real heartaches.10

  In short, gossip was ubiquitous in well-established working-class neighbourhoods – and, put simply, Al Read would not have won such renown for his monologue of the nosy, talkative housewife if it had not been rooted in reality.

  How benign were the effects of all this gossip? ‘An activity that in spite of its general disparagement was the channel for neighbourhood lore and wisdom, and a mechanism for enforcing mores,’ is Ravetz’s largely positive view, while Colls has no doubts:

  Women were streetwise. They kept clear the channels of communication. They knew who was who and where they lived, and they drew on all this as common knowledge . . . To the men, women’s street talk was just gossip. But to those who needed information about a job, a useful contact, or local resource, or a house swap (‘key money’), women’s gossip was a standing committee on public safety. David Reeder and Richard Rodger [two urban historians] once famously referred to cities as the ‘information superhighway’ of their age. At street level, where the flow of information was heaviest, no one knew this better than the mothers. What came to be called community was simply another way of referring to their world.

  In reality it was surely a more mixed picture. ‘It is not surprising that savage fighting frequently broke out in the tenements,’ notes Worth at the end of her passage about the all-consuming nature of gossip for East Enders; Geoffrey Gorer in his 1950–51 People survey of English habits found a significant level of complaints about the gossip of neighbours and reflected that ‘the proverbial “village pump” attitude seems to bedevil the life of many’, while in his detailed Braydon Road study, Kuper tended to emphasise the negative aspects of gossip or, as it was sometimes called, canting:

  The essential triviality of the content of the local gossip is a striking feature. There are very occasional references to extreme cases of immorality. Many comments relate to standards of housekeeping, ‘scruffy homes’; of child-care, ‘dragging up children’; of bearing to neighbours, ‘she thinks she’s the great I am’; and to such social problems as ‘scrounging’. Gossip acts as a restraining influence on behaviour, both directly and indirectly. The direct channel is the repetition of what was said to the person discussed. But indirectly, pressure to conform arises from fear of what neighbours will say. The Hutton family relaxes in the back garden on fine days; the daughters dress lightly, and Mrs Hutton feels sure that the ‘neighbours talk about the “nudity” of the girls’. Visibility is, in fact, so high that it is difficult to get away with only token conformity, such as a highly polished front step and a neglected interior; no one will be taken in by it.

  A further function of gossip is to regulate status reputation. General mode of life, care of the children, are assessed, and families evaluated by these criteria. Possessions, the goods neighbours buy and the prices they pay, are of interest. A group of friends quarrelled on precisely this score. One circulated the story that her friend had paid only seven shillings for some garment, but gave out the price as one pound. Women may be suspected of calling in for the sole purpose of examining their neighbours’ purchases. Residents deflate the pretensions of neighbours, or assert, in a variety of ways, their own superior social position. Discussions of status are an essential part of gossip.

  The residents themselves stress the hazardous aspects. There is the danger of conflict: ‘A tale’s never lost; they add a bit to it, and it goes round the neighbourhood.’ ‘It gets round what you’ve said, and that’s how the trouble starts.’

  Above all, Kuper went on, ‘they emphasise the threat to privacy’ – a threat posed by even apparently harmless gossip. ‘Does it matter if her neighbours know what she bought at a shop, or whether she goes out with her husband’s brother? Yet discussion of these quite neutral topics is resented. Each person maintains a certain sphere of privacy, a private domain, wide or narrow, which is an extension of the personality and an expression of individuality. It is into this private domain that gossip intrudes.’

  Again and again, not least in this context of a deep, if often vain, desire for privacy, one is struck by the limits of
neighbourliness – indeed of mutuality – in even long-established working-class neighbourhoods. Jimmy Boyle recalled how in his street in the Gorbals ‘if someone died the neighbours would go round the houses collecting money in a bedsheet to help the family meet the costs of the burial’, and how ‘from the extreme circumstance of a death to the simple need of borrowing a cup of sugar, help was always at hand’, but Donald James Wheal remembered the still working-class part of Chelsea (before his family moved to White City) quite differently: ‘Sensing a slight, women would not speak to each other for the most trivial reasons. Feuds often developed, sadly between neighbours who needed each other. The World’s End was as riddled with them as any medieval Italian city state.’11

  Contemporary evidence, whether qualitative or quantitative, is more reliable. Take for a start Kerr’s broadly positive account of ‘Ship Street’, where she depicted a world of not much neighbourliness in the sense of social intercourse – compared to constant visiting by relatives – but considerable practical neighbourliness, ‘especially in times of adversity’, and where ‘neighbours who are not on visiting terms hold keys of each other’s homes’ or even ‘accompany each other to hospital’. Yet at the same time she did not deny that in what physically was an intensely close-knit world, ‘feuds are fairly common and range from simple quarrels, which are not made up, to the most complicated vendettas which produce a series of lawsuits’ or even more primitive forms of vengeance. Mogey seemingly did not encounter feuds in St Ebbe’s, but nor did he come across much friendly neighbourliness:

  I don’t believe in talking to the neighbours; you have to be careful what you say.

  I never have a neighbour inside. I am one of those who keep themselves to themselves. Mind you, I’m sociable, I say ‘Good Morning’.

  I’m not one for going into people’s houses unless for illness.

  We don’t mix with the people round here. We’re not gossips like they are: they’re not too bad this end of the street but at the far end the people are always standing on the doorsteps gossiping.

  It’s just a question of knowing people over walls and through doors.

  ‘Of course if anyone wants help, I help,’ one housewife added. ‘Like the man over the road when his wife was in hospital. I went over when he came back from work to ask if he had any lunch. He said not to bother.’ The evidence was also largely negative in the working-men’s clubs in Featherstone, where ‘with regard to “mutual helpfulness” the club’s achievements in this respect are not at all impressive,’ noted Dennis et al, adding that ‘there is no suggestion of “mutual helpfulness” on the basis of need’. Almost everywhere, whether in an old or a new neighbourhood, the all-important distinction – crucial in ensuring broadly amicable relations – was between ‘neighbourly’ and ‘friendly’. The former, Hodges and Smith reflected on the basis of their Sheffield study, was ‘based on willingness to give, or readiness to ask for and accept, help from others’; the latter implied ‘a close reciprocal relationship based on trust, affection and respect’. Inevitably, there were also non-neighbourly relationships between neighbours. But in any case, as Hodges and Smith added, ‘the degree of contact between neighbours is regulated by convention, and there is probably rather less permitted or desired nowadays than in the past’.

  The most striking qualitative evidence was in Kuper’s Braydon Road study – the study of a development specifically built to try to encourage intimacy among its residents. The vox pop speaks cumulatively for itself:

  It’s terrible, you can hear everything.

  When I clean my mirror, it bangs against the wall, and she knocks back. My husband says it’s best to ignore people like that.

  You can even hear them use the pot; that’s how bad it is. It’s terrible.

  People can keep borrowing and not pay back, till in the end you have to refuse them and that is unpleasant.

  I don’t believe in borrowing and lending.

  I don’t believe in going into each other’s houses – you can keep friendly without that. Usually, they are getting to know one another’s business, and perhaps children are standing there listening: though I like to have a neighbour I can depend on, but one that doesn’t take your business out of your house, when they’ve been in your house.

  One woman over the road was getting very friendly – coming over at all times of the day. My husband used to be annoyed when he came home and found that the work hadn’t been done; so was I, because I like to get things finished.

  A friend you can confide in, a neighbour you can’t. What you say to neighbours over the garden wall might be passed on and you might get involved.

  You can let a neighbour know too much.

  If you get too familiar, you’ve got them on your doorstep for the rest of your life.

  I never thought I’d come to hate anybody like I do her.

  I’ve never asked her in. I could see how it was right from the beginning. She was going in people’s houses all day long, and I couldn’t stand that.

  Mrs Adams always used to be coming round. I had to put a stop to it, I couldn’t get on with my work; she used to step over the fence, so we put a higher wire up; and I always kept the gate locked, so that she had to knock at the front door, then I needn’t let her in if I was busy. She’s only been in once lately.

  ‘Stability exists in the area, but does not arise from any feeling of belonging together,’ sensibly concluded the Coventry Evening Telegraph in 1952 after Kuper’s study had gone to the City Council’s Planning and Redevelopment Committee. Book publication the following year earned an equally sensible summary by the TLS of the study’s important but, on the whole, sadly ignored conclusions: ‘One is that intimacy forced on people by the position of houses may lead to hatred and instability instead of friendship and stability. Another is that friendship depends on something more than proximity; it depends on the human beings themselves. Another is that social groups of very different status may be more tolerant to one another than groups nearer in status.’ ‘The district studied was “working-class”,’ added the reviewer, ‘but the inhabitants showed themselves highly aware of social distinctions.’12

  Fortunately, the quantitative evidence prevents either side of the ‘community’ debate from making extravagant claims. The Sheffield study asked 153 housewives on the estate which persons they would ask for help in the event of running out of bread. Almost ten times as many opted for a neighbour as for a relative, though more than 30 per cent replied ‘nobody’. But in the case of serious illness, the figures changed to 48 per cent looking to a neighbour, almost 47 per cent to a relative or someone else, and 5 per cent to nobody. As for neighbourly relations, a companion study at about the same time of a recently developed Liverpool estate found these prevailing attitudes from a sample of 36 families:

  Mutual assistance with expression of good neighbourly relationships: 11

  Little contact with neighbours but an absence of adverse comments about them: 14

  No contact with neighbours and general disapproval of them: 4

  Unwanted contacts with neighbours involving difficult relationships and strong personal criticisms of them: 7

  Positive, neutral, negative – the roughly equal proportions may well have been fairly representative. Mogey, meanwhile, found an interesting contrast in Oxford. Whereas in St Ebbe’s there was roughly a 40 per cent acceptance of next-door neighbours and a 60 per cent rejection (ie in terms of general attitudes expressed to the interviewer), on the much newer Barton estate the ratio was 80 per cent acceptance and 20 per cent rejection. ‘In Barton everything is strange,’ explained Mogey. ‘The house, the layout of the estate, the behaviour of the people, and even the way you view your children has altered subtly.’ Even so, he observed how, among the pioneer families on the estate, the initial burst of ‘great mutual friendliness’ – when ‘groups of people helped one another in all sorts of ways, by shopping, baby minding, helping with the garden, lending, welcoming newly arrived families with a
cup of tea, and so on’ – had inexorably given way to ‘a retreat to the general ideal of “I keep myself to myself” ’.13

  Finally, two national surveys on this vexed subject were confined to neither one place nor one class. ‘How well do you know your next-door neighbours?’ Mass-Observation asked its largely but not exclusively middle-class Panel in 1947:

  Just by name. (Metalworker, 29, near Sandwich)

  It wd be difficult to know less about neighbours than we do. (Musician and journalist, 56)

  I am only acquainted with my neighbour, think well of her, but leave it at that. (Housewife, 39, Glasgow)

  Neighbours on one side known fairly well (old air raid shelter companions) but we have no interests in common. Not on speaking terms with neighbours on other side because they have quarrelled with my relatives. (Teacher, 33, Lancashire)

  On one side enough to say ‘Good morning,’ other side not forgiven us for not fire-watching. (Office worker, 49)

  Too well – don’t like ’em. (Physicist, 41, Castle Bromwich)

  I dislike neighbours who ‘drop in’ often at inconvenient times. On one side is a house badly needing decorating and with two or three children and them I boycott. The other side is a pleasant old lady with whom I have passed the time of day. (Bank clerk, 38, Bradford)