M-O also asked, ‘How many people living in your immediate vicinity do you know, and how well do you know them?’ Again, an underlying apartness prevailed:
There are one or two people with who I may exchange a few words if I see them in their front gardens, and there is one woman with a baby with whom I would walk to the shops if we were going out at the same time. Otherwise we don’t know even the names of any of the people who live near. (Housewife, 32, Leeds)
I have very little in common with most of my neighbours & I haven’t time to spend in cultivating acquaintance unless it promises to grow into a mutual friendship. (Civil servant, 41, Oxted)
I know about 4–5 people – not counting children – in the immediate vicinity well enough to say ‘good-morning’ to them & pass the time of day. That’s all. My children play about with the other children living near – about a dozen – but I don’t encourage them more than I must for I don’t think much of them. (Housewife, 37, Birmingham)
I know the names of all the people on our side of the road for about twenty houses along. I have an idea of their occupations. Some I know personally. I do not go into their homes. The road is wide so I know only a few of those who live opposite. We have a little conversation at the bus shelter. (Housewife, 56, Burnley)
I do not know anyone in the immediate vicinity with any degree of intimacy. I am just on speaking terms with perhaps half a dozen, though only with one have I any interest in common, and that is slight, in a joint attendance at a WEA class several years ago. (Accountant, 46, Sheffield)
Lots I suppose but only to say ‘Good morning etc’ to or have ‘the daily grumble’ with either on the road or perhaps in the bus, wherever we happen to meet. (Housewife, 47, Sunbury-on-Thames)
One panellist, a man living in Willesden, briskly answered both questions together: ‘I know neither my next door neighbours nor any people in the immediate vicinity, except my landlord’s family living in the same house. With them I discuss only formal matters; they are in no sense friends.’
Three years later, in his People survey, Geoffrey Gorer discovered that ‘the typical relationship of the English to their neighbours can probably best be described as distant cordiality’, a memorable phrase justified by the fact that fewer than one in twenty knew them sufficiently well ‘to drop in on without an invitation’. Could they, though, despite this deliberate distance-keeping, rely on their neighbours’ help in a pinch? ‘Only a minority,’ he found. ‘Eight per cent felt they could rely on their neighbours entirely, and another 27 per cent to a large extent; 10 per cent felt they could not rely on their neighbours at all, and 32 per cent only to a small extent. The remainder – just on a quarter – would not commit themselves, and said that “it depends”.’ Significantly, the regional and class breakdowns behind these figures upset two of Gorer’s understandable presumptions. First, it transpired that ‘there is no more reliance on neighbours’ help in the Northern regions than there is in London’; second, ‘there is greater reliance among the well-to-do, the members of the middle classes, than there is among the poor’, ie people with incomes of under £5 a week. ‘The middle class has repeated for generations the cliché that it is the poor who help the poor,’ he wryly added. ‘The poor themselves seem to doubt it.’
There were two other key prevailing emotions that Gorer found in his survey of ‘Friends and Neighbours’. One was the heartfelt desire for quietness and privacy, not least from snooping neighbours. ‘Their noses are longer than their arms,’ typically complained a middle-aged artisan from Cheshire. ‘They cannot live their own lives for watching and meddling in others. Curtain shakes.’ The other emotion, either revealed or complained about, was that powerful nexus of envy-cum-snobbishness. ‘They speak with an Oxford accent but work, perhaps in a better paid job, but have to work to live as I do, but they make you think that they are just that bit above you,’ was the bitter complaint of a 31-year-old worker from Crawley about his neighbours. From a Yorkshireman (calling himself ‘Hard Working Class’) from Barnsley the beef was ‘the way they begrudge what we have and the way they spend their money on drink and gambling and sending the children with bets to the bookie’.14 No neighbour, in short, came without baggage – whether real or imaginary.
Like ‘juggling with jelly’ is how one historian describes the whole question of ‘community’, and not the least of the difficulties is identifying a ‘typical’ working-class district. Was it, for instance, Jennifer Worth’s Stepney or Roy Porter’s New Cross? ‘I took many walks around parts of Stepney to see what it was like,’ the former midwife recalled:
It was simply appalling. The slums were worse than I could ever have imagined. I walked south of Cable Street, down Graces Alley, Dock Street, Sanders Street, Backhouse Lane and Leman Street, and the atmosphere was menacing. Girls hung around in doorways, and men walked up and down the streets, often in groups, or hung around the doors of cafés smoking or chewing tobacco and spitting. The condemned buildings were still standing, nearly 20 years after they had been scheduled for demolition, and were still being lived in. A few families and old people who could not get away remained, but mostly the occupants were prostitutes, homeless immigrants, drunks or meths drinkers, and drug addicts. There were no general shops selling food and household necessities as the shops had been turned into all-night cafés, which in fact meant they were brothels. The only shops I saw were tobacconists.
It was certainly different – and probably more typical – in New Cross:
All the men were in work, many with big local employers such as the council, Surrey Commercial Docks, the railways, London Transport, Borough market or Peek Frean’s biscuit factory; women kept house and raised children. Husbands had wives, housewives had breadwinners, and children had parents (and aunts-in-laws and grandparents round the corner). Families stuck together. Menfolk slipped down to the Royal Archer, but there were no notorious drunks or wife-beaters. Nor was there violence or crime. Girls skipped, and we boys kicked a tennis ball in the street, and mothers didn’t worry too much: there was little backstreet traffic – no one we knew owned a car – and no fear of child-molesters.
‘Nobody liked living in New Cross Gate,’ Porter wholly concedes, ‘yet there was much to be said for that kind of respectable working-class inner-city neighbourhood that is now [1994] pretty much a thing of the past.’15
New Cross was home to Millwall FC, playing at the take-no-prisoners Den in Cold Blow Lane, and arguably ‘community’ flourished most – assuming it did exist – in the context of an embattled (or anyway entrenched) contra mundum group of people sharing the same physical location and a similar set of attitudes towards the dissident, the outsider, the other. Take the oral memories of Danny Brandon, who worked at the Royal Group of Docks, south of West Ham:
In those days you didn’t just work on the docks, you lived by dockers, you were a community, the man next door was a docker, the man over the road, you were a very closely knit community. And that’s the reason why a scab in those days he certainly took, not his life, in that sense, but he was a man that would be ostracised, not just at work but where he lived, because they cut one and we all bled, it was as simple as that, which was one of the reasons for the militancy in the docks.
In the East End more generally, the immediate post-war years were characterised by an ugly rash of anti-Semitism, with Robb’s Bethnal Green survey finding that more than 26 per cent of his sample were ‘extreme anti-Semites’, regarding Jews as (in the paraphrased words of one of his interviewees) people who were ‘mean, operate a black market, drive hard bargains, are unscrupulous businessmen, full of low cunning, unpatriotic, dirty in their habits, have foreign accents and gesticulate’. Or take Coventry, where Kuper’s Braydon Road study detailed the deep resentment felt by Coventrians towards the many incomers since the 1930s. ‘Friendliness seems to have disappeared these days’, ‘All out for themselves’, and ‘Always trying to get on in the world – rush, rush, rush’ were typical attitudes towards non-Cove
ntrians, one of whom told Kuper: ‘Coventry people always class us as foreigners. They say: “Go back to your own place.” There’s a lot of jealousy here.’ The overall picture is perhaps of an infinite cluster of small, cut-off worlds in which one was either in or out. ‘A different code of ethics is held towards people outside the group,’ Kerr explained in 1953 about ‘Ship Street’ to the British Association, meeting that year in Liverpool. ‘It is not stealing to shoplift in the big stores, but a dreadful crime to pinch anything from “Mum”.’ And she added that in that particular small world, ‘fear and superstition are predominant’.
So, ‘community’ or not? Alison Ravetz is surely on the right lines when she argues that ‘perhaps a more fruitful concept to apply to traditional working-class life than the ambiguous one of “community” would be “localism”,’ adding that ‘it was the immediate locality that supplied the economy, the shared culture and the frameworks of personal development’. The contemporary evidence, moreover, is clear that most people had a strong – if not necessarily overwhelming – attachment to their own particular locality. Yet if ‘localism’ is a more accurate term, it undeniably lacks the emotional resonance of ‘community’. Moreover, the truth surely is that although the British were indeed a more individualistic people in the 1940s and 1950s than has often been assumed, they were not yet quite as solipsistic as they were to become. In October 1948 the young Enid Palmer, training as a nurse and presumably in uniform, rode out on her bike from her lodgings in Colchester. ‘This morning,’ she wrote to her parents in Kenya, ‘everybody had red cheeks – & they were breathing clouds of vapour into the frosty air. Everybody seemed lively and cheerful – & hundreds of people must have wished me a “good morning’’ – everybody from the policeman at the corner, the bricklayers, the chimney sweep black under his layer of soot, the baker, postman, etc . . .’16
PART THREE
10
Hit It Somebody
Mollie Panter-Downes on 5 October 1952 sent her regular letter to the New Yorker not from London but from Morecambe. There, amid ‘some of Britain’s nippiest blasts’, she described the setting for Labour’s just-finished party conference, which had provided ‘a striking contradiction of the theory that the British are a stolid, unemotional race’:
Shivering delegates, hanging on to their sheaves of agenda for dear life, were blown along the waterfront, together with the more normal visitors – jolly parties of mill girls on the spree, who were having a fine time eating saucerfuls of orange and pink cockles and mussels, buying souvenirs of pottery Alsatian dogs and shaving mugs decorated with the Queen’s picture, and not giving a whoop for the drama going on in the Winter Garden Theatre. Inside this ungardenlike spot, a remarkably melancholy Victorian structure with a total absence of ventilation, the conference set to for four and a half days in an atmosphere so thick with cigarette smoke and rancorous passions that the world’s press, skied up in the gallery, with the fumes of both rising toward them, were practically kippered where they sat.
What was the drama’s import? ‘The air at Morecambe buzzed with the sound of explaining voices playing the Bevan successes down, playing them jubilantly up, predicting that they would finish Attlee, predicting that Bevan had bitten off more than he could chew, and so on.’
The defining event of an uninhibitedly fractious, ill-tempered conference – ‘Shut your gob,’ shouted the right-wing miners’ leader Will Lawther at one heckler, while at least two bouts of fisticuffs were reported, one of them involving the heavyweight Bessie Braddock – was the election for constituency representatives on the National Executive Committee (NEC). Six out of the seven places went to avowed Bevanites (including Wilson and Crossman), at the expense of such senior figures as Morrison and Dalton. The union block vote remained firmly attached to the right of the party, but this was still a stunning coup on the part of the Bevanites, increasingly a party within the party.
Then, almost as soon as the delegates had left squally Morecambe, Gaitskell intensified the mood of internecine strife by making a highly provocative speech at Stalybridge. He accused a significant minority of the (increasingly middle-class) constituency delegates of being ‘Communists or Communist controlled’; made a derogatory reference to ‘mob rule by a group of frustrated journalists’ (with the left-wing, Bevan-supporting Tribune explicitly mentioned); and called for a restoration of ‘the authority and leadership of the solid and sensible majority of the Movement’. Gaitskell was on the panel for the next Any Questions?, from Calne, and unsurprisingly the question came up, ‘Does the team consider that the split in the Socialist Party will widen in the future?’ The farmer-writer A. G. Street believed it would, and earned laughter and applause for his sally that ‘the ultra-Left-Wing are those people who wish to be generous to others with other people’s money’, but the Shadow Chancellor played a pretty dead bat: ‘This is the Light Programme, Mr Chairman, and you won’t expect a serious pronouncement from me on this matter.’ He did promise, however, that by the next election ‘we shall have settled that argument one way or the other’.1
Attlee as usual proved a resourceful, unflappable fire-fighter. Approaching his 70th birthday, he was determined to stay as leader for as long as it took to ensure that neither Bevan nor Morrison succeeded him; and on 23 October, at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), he successfully moved a resolution not only banning all unofficial groups within the party but also forbidding all personal attacks. The result was a semi-ceasefire for the next 18 months or so, but the pro-Bevan New Statesman was certain that Bevanism would not die, given that it was ‘the expression of a deep fissure between the official Party machine and the mass of everyday Socialists’. To one somewhat disenchanted party worker, writing in the Political Quarterly just as he departed the political scene, the puzzle was that Labour had so entirely failed to be a vigorous, coherent opposition to the Tories. ‘Why have the Bevanites been allowed to hold the field?’ he asked. ‘One reason is the extraordinary freak of yet another hair’s-breadth election. It can be argued that a government which came so near to winning a third term cannot have been so far wrong.’ And he went on: ‘The middle-of-the-road voters apparently approved of the moderate (practically non-existent) programme of 1951, without any specific proposals for further nationalisation. Why then adopt more radical policies? All the more reason for avoiding extremism when its chief advocate is Mr Bevan, who is thought of as being as violently disliked by the body of voters as he is violently admired by his followers.’
The party worker was Michael Young, who in November 1952 bequeathed to Labour’s Policy Committee a sociologically flavoured report called ‘For Richer For Poorer’ – a plea, ‘in its policy-making for the future’, to ‘give some prominence to the needs of the family’, especially young parents suffering from ‘less money, less leisure, and less companionship’. The answer to these shortfalls lay neither in ‘the worship of consumption’ (a worship, according to Young, fuelled by advertising, radio, films and women’s magazines) nor in the welfare state (‘the first cold word recalling the smell of carbolic acid and the tough brown paper of ration books . . . the second cold word suggesting the Law Court, the Sanitary Inspector and the Recruiting Office’). Instead, he now placed his faith unequivocally in the C-word: ‘Revival of the community would relieve the burden of loneliness and overwork.’ One way of achieving this revival was ‘rehousing people in the central areas of our cities and towns, as part of a great plan of urban reconstruction, instead of forcing them to move to housing estates on the outskirts’, but he also wanted to ‘lower the barriers of class which divide people from one another by speeding on with comprehensive schools and by distributing power (and prestige) more widely through an extension of industrial democracy’. Predictably, Young’s report met the fate of most reports. ‘The Policy Committee never had, I think, a 250-page report before – no one read it!’ he recalled many years later. ‘It was just a sort of embarrassment when they got it. Except for Edith Summerskill [
an MP who was also a doctor], who did read a bit of it, about women, and thought it was rather good and said, “How on earth did you think up all this?” That was really the only comment on it at all. But it certainly confirmed my view that politics wasn’t for me.’
One immediate bonus was no longer having to fret about the question of nationalisation. ‘It is no longer any use discussing in principle whether public ownership would be desirable,’ Young declared in his parting pronouncement on the subject. ‘We have to get down to cases . . .’ He cited shipbuilding, chemicals and insurance (an old favourite) as three potentially fruitful sectors. Another left-wing intellectual, G.D.H. Cole, advocated in January 1953 twofold criteria in terms of Labour’s future nationalisation commitments: ‘Any further nationalisation will be a success only if the workers like it, and only if it is undertaken, not simply for the sake of smashing capitalism, but also with a positive view to its contribution towards getting Great Britain out of the economic difficulties under which it is labouring.’ In fact, to a surprising extent, Labour at this point was relatively unruffled about the whole issue, with instead the major internal fault lines concerning foreign policy, above all attitudes to America. Importantly, there was no Tory threat to the bulk of the nationalisation carried out by the Attlee government, with road haulage and steel as the only two sectors receiving the privatisation treatment. Neither proved hugely contentious, with the latter much facilitated by the support from the steelworkers’ leader, Lincoln Evans. Knighted at the start of 1953, and soon afterwards made vice-chairman of the Iron and Steel Board (at a handsome annual salary of £5,000), which had the power to fix maximum prices, he was the epitome of the right-wing trade unionist who placed harmonious industrial relations with management well above socialist ideology.2
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 30