Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  An appeal on Bentley’s behalf was lodged, but dismissed on 13 January. On Friday the 23rd, only five days before he was due to hang, Bentley’s family handed in a petition (with 12,000 signatures) at the Home Office. That weekend, with Maxwell Fyfe considering whether to commute the death sentence, the Sunday papers were full of the case. ‘If two men go upon some criminal adventure, the one armed and the other knowing him to be armed, the other no less than the one intends the consequences, and if they include a killing the unarmed intends it and is a murderer,’ was the unrelenting view of the Sunday Times. ‘That is not only the law, it is just law, and good plain sense.’ Britain’s highest-circulation paper, the News of the World, did not commit itself to a formal opinion, but devoted much of its front page to the story. ‘Bentley’s Pets Join Family Circle as The 11th Hour Approaches,’ ran the headline, accompanied by a photo of Bentley’s sister Iris holding Flossie, a lurcher puppy, and Judy, a Manchester terrier, while Bentley’s favourite dog Bob and Banjo the cat looked on. ‘The main reason for his reprieve was that, since his arrest, these dogs had been off their food,’ an otherwise sympathetic Rayner Heppenstall sourly recalled press calls for commutation.7

  The following day, Monday the 26th, Derek’s father, William, received a letter from the Home Office informing him that the Home Secretary was unable to advise a reprieve, while on Tuesday morning the two most popular daily papers pronounced. The Daily Express was unambiguous, accusing Bentley’s defenders of ‘wallowing in sentiment’, but the Daily Mirror more cautious, though in the end tacitly endorsing the ‘humane’ Maxwell Fyfe: ‘The fate of Bentley must be read as a warning that there will not be leniency towards anyone who goes along with a man who carries a gun.’ That Tuesday evening, with only hours to go, there were not only large crowds of protesters outside Parliament and elsewhere but also angry speeches by Labour MPs, including R. T. Paget. ‘A three-quarter witted boy of 19 is to be hanged for a murder which he did not commit, and which was committed 15 minutes after he was arrested,’ was how he memorably put it. Crucially, even though some 200 MPs had signed a petition demanding mercy, the Speaker refused to allow a debate on the Home Secretary’s decision as such. ‘So a human life must go,’ reflected the young actor Kenneth Williams in disgust, ‘because discussion of his death is “out of order”!’

  Bentley was duly hanged at Wandsworth Prison at nine on Wednesday morning, with a crowd of 5,000 outside. ‘Just follow me, lad,’ the hangman Albert Pierrepoint gently whispered as he put the pinioning-loop upon Bentley’s wrists and suddenly made it tight. ‘It’s all right Derek, just follow me.’ A few hours later, shortly before lunch, Maxwell Fyfe entered the Tory club, the Carlton, ‘looking white and exhausted’ according to the watching, liberal-minded Humphrey Berkeley. ‘Suddenly a group of Club members appeared carrying their whiskeys and dry martinis in their hands and clapped Sir David on the back with shouts of “Well done, David.” ’ Maxwell Fyfe, ‘one of the kindest men I have ever met, obviously was repelled by the demonstration’.

  Elsewhere, the horror was palpable. ‘THIS THING SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN DONE,’ thundered ‘Cassandra’ in his Daily Mirror column that morning, describing Bentley as ‘a weak, vicious youth whose parents attempted to keep him away from Craig’; at a junior school in Dormanstown, Teesside, the 11-year-old Rosalind Delmar was asked at morning assembly ‘to pray for his soul, with the sense that in London a great injustice was being done’ – a moment that for Delmar gave ‘a whiff of a wider view of justice as a yardstick with which those in power could be measured’; and in London itself, the visiting Jean Genet was, according to his biographer Edmund White, ‘so appalled by the execution that he never emerged from the Regent Palace Hotel’. The chances are, though, that the female diarists more accurately reflected majority opinion. After referring on the 28th to ‘the Bentley-Craig gang’ and to Maxwell Fyfe’s ‘terrible position to be in’, Nella Last in Barrow was adamant: ‘ “Emotional” people cannot be let rule – or over-ride wise if terrible decisions.’ Judy Haines in Chingford almost certainly agreed. ‘I must say,’ she wrote that same day after briefly summarising what had happened, ‘these young thugs scare the life out of me and it needs some drastic measure to make them think twice.’ And Langford three days later was shocked by how the police sergeant who made the initial arrest had apparently been threatened with murder by several people: ‘I find it hard to understand the sympathy lavished on that young thug Bentley.’ What none of the three could have known was that almost half a century later, following a lifelong campaign by his sister Iris and almost systematic evasion and suppression of evidence by the Home Office, Bentley would have his name cleared by a latter-day Lord Chief Justice, highly critical of his predecessor’s direction to the jury. Bentley, declared Lord Bingham of Cornhill in 1998, had been denied ‘that fair trial which is the birthright of every British citizen’.8

  In 1953 itself, there was soon another murder story. ‘Three Women Walled Up in House of Two Murders’, was the Daily Express headline on 25 March, with the paper noting that the bodies had been discovered in the same house – 10 Rillington Place, near Ladbroke Grove – where Timothy Evans had killed his wife and daughter before being hanged at Pentonville in 1950. But the story was not yet front-page news, for on the same day as these grisly discoveries, Queen Mary died. ‘What has been her reward for duty bravely done?’ asked the Express. ‘Her reward is the greatest of all honours. Her reward is the tears which are shed today in humble homes throughout the land.’ At the Mirror it fell to the young Keith Waterhouse to compile a three-part series, ‘The Human Stories of Queen Mary’, including such characteristic bon mots as ‘Illness is so tiresome’ and ‘I have never been bored in my life, and I have no patience with people who are bored.’ ‘We sometimes smiled at her old-fashionedness and chuckled at her idiosyncrasies,’ Waterhouse himself reflected. ‘But it was a kind smile and a happy chuckle for Grandmother England.’ Soon, though, the two stories were vying on front pages, as the Rillington Place body count rose to six and the house’s long-time inhabitant, John Christie, was apprehended near Putney Bridge. That was on the last day of March, by which time in Rillington Place itself Mrs McFadden at no. 5 had organised a petition asking for the name of the cul-de-sac to be changed. ‘Every householder signed it,’ observed one journalist, ‘for somehow a violent death in their midst, brought a sense of social, communal shame to the more decent folk.’ Rillington Place in due course became Rushton Close, subsequently demolished.

  Christie’s trial was still to come, but Bill Field had already had his encounter with British justice. He was a 43-year-old Labour MP, and widely regarded as a rising figure, when in January he was found guilty at Bow Street Court of ‘persistently importuning men for an immoral purpose in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square’. On the Tuesday evening in question, earlier that month, he had, according to the police, gone to several pubs as well as paying four visits to public lavatories in the course of 90 minutes. ‘At any time did you smile at anyone, first of all deliberately . . . what I would call filthily?’ asked at one point his QC, a Tory MP called John Maude who gave his services for free. ‘No, but I may have smiled at someone subconsciously,’ replied Field. Maude also led Field’s defence at the appeal in February at the London Sessions, but again to no avail. During it, one of the two policemen who had been keeping watch on the MP ‘agreed that entries in his notebook were not made at the time in question and that he had lied about the notebook at the magistrate’s court’. To which Maude ‘said it was frightening if a man could be convicted on the evidence of a police officer, who had been caught perjuring himself’. On the appeal being dismissed, Field ‘sat as though stunned, appeared to wipe away a tear, then hurried out’. Kenneth Williams, on tour that week in Norwich in a production of Peter Pan, might have sympathised. ‘Everyone at the Copper Kettle stayed up late and talked,’ he noted next day after the Saturday-evening performance: ‘The awfully boring & hearty commercial traveller became suddenly c
onfidential. He took me aside in the kitchen, in a burst of confession, and explained that he was homosexual. I had to act deliberately nonchalant to cover my dumbfoundedness, confusion and embarrassment. I practically fell over myself in the effort to be casual and burnt my fingers on the gas ring. Life holds so many surprises for us.’ Field himself immediately resigned his seat, disappearing not only from politics but also from all his friends. ‘He felt the disaster keenly,’ recorded his 2002 obituary, ‘and to the end he maintained he had been trapped and martyred because he was an MP.’9

  There were other faces that did not fit. ‘Today there is a residential coloured community of about 50,000 here, and that very articulate body of opinion which uses the words “colour prejudice” upon its oriflame insists we take them into our hearts and into our homes,’ declared David Divine in a long article in the right-wing Sunday Graphic in October 1952. ‘Should we?’ he asked, arguing that black workers were poor at keeping their jobs and that ‘because they live with a perpetual chip on their shoulder they claim that dismissal is always due to colour prejudice’. Divine also asserted that white dislike of blacks was based less on prejudice than a reaction to the ‘lawlessness’ and ‘arrogance’ of ‘the coloured colony’. Half the letters the following Sunday defended black immigrants, but half did not. ‘There should be a colour bar, and I am not ashamed to say so,’ wrote in Ralph H. Taylor of Edgware, while Sydney G. Gibbs reckoned that ‘the unrestricted invasion of England by the coloured races is a scandal’.

  Evidence that a de facto colour bar already existed was given by Henry Gunter, the Jamaican co-founder of the Birmingham branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress, in an article the following February about the situation in that city. Gunter detailed grossly overcrowded living conditions for many black workers there, extortionate rents, a mixture of discrimination and exploitation at work, and a widespread colour bar at hotels, dance halls and social clubs. Traditionally, black migration had been to dockland areas, but by now it was increasingly going inland to the great manufacturing centres. ‘The coloured people are concentrated in overcrowded areas where the housing facilities are worst,’ the academic Michael Banton noted sombrely in March. ‘The absence of friction may be largely attributed to the full employment of the post-war period. And economic recession could easily open the old wounds and cause new ones.’ Soon afterwards Catherine Cookson published her third novel, Colour Blind, showing the power of love to triumph over Tyneside intolerance to mixed-race relationships, but that basic economic truth was unlikely to go away.10

  It was all distinctly white and middle-class in Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, which opened in London in November 1952 to no great expectations on the author’s part. The play was set in a country guest house, with a cast of eight including Richard Attenborough as Detective Sergeant Trotter, and got a fairly tepid response from the critics. ‘The plot is altogether incredible, and there is a bit of cheating into the bargain,’ claimed Iain Hamilton in the Spectator, though he did concede that it was still ‘an entertaining evening for simple souls like myself who don’t really care overmuch who killed X’. T. C. Worsley was especially down on the second half. ‘It won’t do,’ he asserted in the New Statesman. ‘We are thoroughly dissatisfied, for the clearing up has been most perfunctorily done. The stage is left strewn with uneaten red herrings, unexplained presences, unanswered questions. We find that for once Mrs Christie has been swindling and on a very large scale too. This is unforgivable in detective fiction.’ Setting less exacting – and more representative – standards was the strictly amateur reviewer Anthony Heap, present on the first night and enjoying ‘a nice entertaining evening of guessing, suspecting, trailing red herrings and coming to false conclusions, to our simple heart’s content’. In short: ‘Agatha Christie has, in fact, whodunit again. Signifying that the Ambassadors shouldn’t be looking for another distraction until well after the Coronation.’ Heap was slightly out – the play continued at the Ambassadors until 1974, when it transferred next door to St Martin’s – but it was still a creditable estimate. What was the secret of The Mousetrap’s phenomenal success? ‘There cannot be just one answer,’ mused its producer, Peter Saunders, in 1958. ‘But it has all the ingredients of the best quiz games, it is dramatic, it has comedy, suspense, and it can be understood by people of every age.’11

  Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, published in April 1953 and marking the fictional debut of James Bond, offered a different kind of thrill. ‘An extremely engaging affair,’ thought the TLS, ‘dealing with espionage in the Sapper manner but with a hero who, although taking a great many cold showers and never letting sex interfere with work, is somewhat more sophisticated,’ while Simon Raven in the Listener acclaimed Fleming as ‘a kind of supersonic John Buchan’. The most glowing review was in the Sunday Times – for which, admittedly, Fleming worked as foreign manager. Finding it an adult thriller that was a welcome relief from ‘the side street and back bedrooms of Graham Greeneland’, Christopher Pym, pseudonym for Cyril Ray, went on: ‘Here is a new writer who takes us back to the casinos of le Queux and Oppenheim, the world of caviare and fat Macedonian cigarettes. But with how much more pace in the writing, how much less sentimentality in the tone of voice, how much more knowing a look!’ Altogether, the reviewer was ‘pretty certain’ that Fleming was ‘the best new English thriller-writer since Ambler’.

  He had a case. ‘Fleming wanted to inject something of Chandler’s gritty realism into the British spy novel,’ his biographer Andrew Lycett has observed, and ‘to write about an emerging culture of intelligence where spies were no longer amateur adventurers like Bulldog Drummond but professional hard men.’ Nothing more gritty and unsentimental than the brutal ending, with the lovely Vesper Lynd revealed as a double agent working for SMERSH. ‘He saw her now only as a spy. Their love and his grief were relegated to the boxroom of his mind.’ The new hard-faced professionalism came, though, with some distinctly unreconstructed baggage. ‘These blithering women’, Bond believed, should ‘stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men’, while the baccarat players he was pitted against included an Italian who would ‘probably play a dashing and foolish game’ and the Maharajah of a small Indian state unlikely to alter Bond’s maxim that ‘few of the Asiatic races were courageous gamblers’. In fact, Casino Royale did not sell particularly well – probably because the time was not quite ripe for what the historian David Cannadine has characterised as Fleming’s ‘fictional brand of great-power nostalgia, imperial escapism and national reassurance’.12 Put another way, Britain in 1953 was not yet a country in perceived – let alone self-perceived – decline.

  Anyway, the undisputed literary event of 1952/3 had already happened: the publication in November of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems. Philip Toynbee in the Observer hailed him as ‘the greatest living poet’, while Stephen Spender in the Spectator asserted that Thomas represented ‘a revolt’ not only ‘against the Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard intellectualism of much modern poetry’ but also ‘against the King’s English of London and the South’, incapable of ‘harsh effects, coarse nature and violent colours’. The initial print run of 5,000 soon proved inadequate. One young writer and emerging literary impresario, however, professed himself impatient with Thomas’s ‘disastrously limited subject matter’. This was John Wain, who on the last Sunday of April 1953 introduced on the Third Programme First Reading: A Monthly Magazine of New Poetry and Prose. On the Home Service at the same time there was a programme about the British Red Cross, including a recorded interview by Wilfred Pickles at a children’s hospital in Warwickshire, while on the Light a variety show called The Pleasure Boat starred Julie Andrews and Jon Pertwee, but presumably some people listened. First up was an extract (read by the actor Alan Wheatley) from Kingsley Amis’s still unpublished novel Lucky Jim, with Wain announcing that ‘the particular episode we are going to hear opens with the hero, Dixon, suffering from a hangover and a bad conscienc
e’. In fact the typescript of the novel was still with the publishers Gollancz, whose Hilary Rubinstein next day wrote to Amis to say that his firm did indeed want to publish it. Victor Gollancz himself disliked it, but was persuaded (including by his daughter Livia) to sanction the not exactly princely advance of £100.13

  If the literary scene in the early 1950s was due for new voices and new faces, so too was popular music, still dominated by ballroom dancing, big-band swing and romantic crooners. ‘Incredibly bland and lacking inspiration,’ was the succinct retrospective verdict of Bill Wyman, especially scornful of moon-in-June ballads ‘without any balls’. Even the commercial station Radio Luxembourg, on 208 medium wave, had relatively little to offer restless youth, to judge by its line-up on the evening of Friday, 14 November 1952:

  7.30 – Nat Cole

  7.45 – Hutch

  8 – Vera Lynn sings

  8.30 – George Elrick’s Cavalcade of Music

  9.45 – Vic Damone

  10 – Ray Ellington Quartet

  10.15 – Highlights

  10.30 – Tunes of the Times

  That same day, though, marked the generally acknowledged start of the modern British record industry. ‘For the first time in the history of the British popular music business,’ declared New Musical Express, ‘an authentic weekly survey of the best-selling “pop” records [still mainly 78-rpm shellac] has been devised and instituted.’ Even so, the chart’s top five (Al Martino, Jo Stafford, the not yet crowned Nat Cole, Bing Crosby and Guy Mitchell) hardly represented seismic change, while the following spring the band leader Ted Heath, accompanied by his vocalists Dickie Valentine and Lita Roza, was top of the bill for the NME’s 1953 Poll Winners’ Concert at the Royal Albert Hall.