Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Still, something was undeniably in the air when ‘The Nabob of Sob’, aka ‘The Prince of Wails’, aka Johnnie Ray, flew into London Airport in March for his first visit to England. Centrepiece of his tour was a fortnight at the London Palladium, watched by the News of the World’s ‘Old Trouper’: ‘When Johnnie walked on, the audience swooned in an ecstasy of hysteria; when he shouted his song down a hand-mic as he threw himself all over the stage, I didn’t think they could bear any more. “Cry, Johnnie, cry!” they shouted . . .’ Noël Coward attended the opening night – ‘He was really remarkable and had the whole place in an uproar’ – but even more appreciative was the prominent Labour MP and socialite Tom Driberg. He went to see Ray’s act (only about 25 minutes long), spoke ‘tenderly’ about him, showed him round the House of Commons, had his advances repudiated and wrote a lengthy article (‘For Crying Out Loud . . .’) in the New Statesman. ‘His impulses are generous and not anti-social,’ noted Driberg, before concluding even more pompously: ‘His best service to himself, and to society, would be resolutely to complete his adjustment to adult life. Some of his fans might then start growing up with him, too.’14

  In the City of London, another new, rather more brutal face was also the subject of condescension, albeit tinged with fear. An entirely self-made man (the son of Russian Jewish immigrants), Charles Clore was in his late forties and had made most of his money in property. A biographer’s phrases are striking about this pragmatic, hard-bitten outsider. He possessed an ‘utterly ruthless honesty’; his will had ‘the force of granite’; a pair of ‘cobalt eyes made people cringe’; and ‘he expected the worst of people and was rarely surprised’. Another biographer describes Clore as ‘virile, sexually gluttonous, often crude and impatient’. Early in 1953 he made a contested bid – an almost unheard-of phenomenon – for the Northampton-based shoe manufacturers J. Sears & Co, parent company of Freeman, Hardy & Willis. In the end, amid palpable City shock, his offer proved too good to refuse. ‘We never thought anything like this would happen to us,’ were the valedictory words of the departing Sears chairman, while the Northampton Independent quoted Clore himself: ‘I am, of course, delighted. Now we must take our coats off and get down to business.’

  Hard-headed commentators like the Economist shed no tears, arguing that ‘it is those who make the bids for shares who are paying the greatest regard to economic principles’ and warning that ‘Government interference with such bids would be a shelter for inefficient directors, inefficient utilisation of assets and inefficient distribution of risk capital’; but Tory backbenchers as well as City grandees expressed disquiet, especially as Clore did not deny that he had further takeover plans. ‘Lord Bicester [of the merchant bank Morgan Grenfell] came in to say that he was very agitated about further manoeuvres by Mr Clore,’ the Governor of the Bank of England, Kim Cobbold, recorded in June, and a little later he noted that the even more senior Sir Edward Peacock of Barings was ‘unhappy about Mr Clore and similar activities which seem to be spreading but he agrees with me in not seeing what on earth can be done about it’.15 The wider import was unmistakable: the cosy, paternalistic world of family capitalism, deeply embedded in the British economic system even after the rise of the large corporation during the first half of the century, was now under threat as never before.

  Leonard Lord, in charge of Austin at Longbridge, was temperamentally in the same domineering, unyielding mould as Clore. In September 1952 he presided over the dismissal of seven hundred workers, seven of whom were shop stewards, including John McHugh, an Austin employee since 1928. Over the next five months, as the economic climate improved, McHugh remained out in the cold. There is conflicting evidence as to whether he himself was a Communist, but it is clear enough from contemporary documents that his dismissal was, in one historian’s words, ‘a deliberate management attempt to weaken the NUVB [National Union of Vehicle Builders], the Austin Shop Stewards Committee [headed by Dick Etheridge, an avowed Communist] and the left-wing in the factory’. The strike began on 17 February, involving 2,278 of Austin’s NUVB members, and Lord that day issued a notice denying that McHugh had been victimised and refusing to give him ‘preferential treatment’ because he was a shop steward. As usual, the strikers received little sympathy from the press, with The Times predictably emphasising the Communist influence in the dispute, and even the Mirror expressing its opposition to preferential treatment for shop stewards. Towards the end of March, Lord dismissed 1,800 strikers. ‘The N.U.V.B. have asked for a fight and they have got it,’ commented the Birmingham Post. ‘It is in the general interest that they should be thoroughly beaten . . . Partnership between managers and workers is essential for our national survival.’ A government-appointed Court of Inquiry broadly came down on management’s side, and the strike finally ended in early May very much on Lord’s terms, with no reinstatement for McHugh or indeed the other six shop stewards. It had not only been the biggest strike in Birmingham since the war but also set a record as the motor industry’s largest single-firm stoppage. ‘In my opinion,’ retrospectively commented Les Gurl (emerging as Etheridge’s counterpart at the Morris plant at Cowley), ‘this dispute soured the relationship between the Unions and Austin Management for many years.’16

  The strike coincided with the passing of the world’s most famous Communist. ‘We touched on the Stalin situation and we agreed it was just as well Eden [the Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden] was over there as he might be a stabilising influence,’ the chairman of the London Discount Market Association complacently reflected after a conversation with the Governor of the Bank of England, as the Russian leader lay on his deathbed. Next morning, 6 March, Stalin’s death was duly announced. ‘The Radio news-reader did not use the sepulchral tones and make the reverential pause customarily used in the broadcasting of obituary notices,’ noted Gladys Langford, probably with some pleasure, but the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner was outraged by ‘an account of such gross & vulgar malice’ that ‘I could hardly believe my ears.’ Later that morning, at Yates’s wine bar in Manchester, Michael Wharton (the future Daily Telegraph satirist ‘Peter Simple’) joined colleagues from the BBC features department. ‘What’s the matter? What has happened?’ he asked after noticing that they seemed stunned and unhappy. ‘Haven’t you heard the news? Stalin is dead,’ one of them replied. ‘Pity he was ever born,’ was Wharton’s instant response – a response that ‘to these people was simply blasphemous’, he recalled, with the result that ‘they did not speak to me again for a fortnight’.

  Public reactions to the death of Uncle Joe inevitably varied widely. ‘Never’, declared the British Communist leader Harry Pollitt in the Daily Worker, ‘have I met anyone so kindly and considerate,’ but the Daily Mirror’s ‘Cassandra’ offered an unyielding judgement: ‘His purpose was evil and his methods unspeakable. Few men by their death can have given such deep satisfaction to so many.’ It was a death that offered the possibility of a thaw in the Cold War, especially with the Korean War winding down towards an eventual ceasefire in July. Even so, the experience of the left-wing Reverend Stanley Evans suggested it was a thaw that would take some time to permeate the British establishment. In April, after 17 years in Orders but still without a proper job in the Church of England, he appealed directly to the Bishop of London, explaining that ‘. . . the cause which I have most espoused, that of friendship between East and West, is of fundamental importance not only for our national future but also for the future of Christianity as a whole.’17 But despite the Church’s manpower problems, he remained out in the cold.

  There were two rather more auspicious moments this April, starting at 4.00 on Tuesday the 21st with the first broadcast of Watch With Mother. Initially it was shown only two or three times a week, with the well-established Andy Pandy more or less alternating with The Flowerpot Men, the latter first seen climbing out the previous December. Their creator was Hilda Brabban, whose younger brothers, William and Benjamin, were so mischievous that their mother would shout, ‘Was it
Bill or was it Ben?’ So a catchphrase was born, though the Flowerpot Men’s language (officially known as Oddle Poddle) was so incomprehensible that the programme was quite sharply criticised for encouraging immaturity. The other moment was of a different order: Francis Crick and James Watson, British biophysicist and American viro-chemist, publishing in Nature on the 25th a description of the double helix – in effect, revealing the structure of DNA, widely acknowledged as the scientific discovery of the century. In fact, much of their data derived from the work of Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant young physical chemist based at King’s College, London. To Crick and Watson fell the glory of the Nobel Prize, along with the molecular biologist Maurice Wilkins; to Franklin, an early death from cancer and years of obscurity before her contribution was properly acknowledged.

  The last day of the month was a Thursday. For Nella Last in Barrow, domestic life that evening revolved as usual round her fussy, valetudinarian husband: ‘He decided he would like to hear the play from 7 to 8 o’clock. Luckily it was an effortless “happy” play. How “fashions” in entertaining are changing, a kind of little “story” in place of the joyous idiocy of ITMA & oh dear they don’t seem very entertaining. Plays, & Twenty Questions, Palm Court, & the schools broadcast are the best of “light” entertainment. I often feel sorry that Woman’s Hour & my husband’s rest after lunch, should coincide.’18

  In October 1952, more than eleven years after the worst of the German bombing, Gladys Langford walked tearfully around Homerton, where she had grown up:

  Everywhere seemed so small, the streets so narrow, the devastation so great. The whole place almost unrecognisable . . . Many tombstones in Hackney Churchyard have been blitzed – a keeper told me it is planned to clear away the tombs. The lovely old Eagle House (once a doss house) is badly blitzed & derelict. St Barnabas Church is a shell. Brooksby’s Walk has lost almost all the houses near the church & ‘prefabs’ with nice little gardens cover the spot where the pock-marked cobbler wielded his knife & nails . . .

  In London as in most of Britain’s badly blitzed cities, the pace of physical reconstruction continued to be painfully slow. A series in the Architects’ Journal in 1952/3 was generally dismayed by the lack of vim and vigour on the part of local authorities, typified by ‘extraordinarily dilatory’ Bristol and the ‘niggardly’ fulfilment of promises in Portsmouth. Or, as a Southampton MP explained to the Commons in March 1953 about his city, ‘very few of the shops, offices and business premises have been reconstructed’, while ‘one sees a large number of bare and desolate patches of ground which are covered by willow herb and other wild flowers’. A partial exception was Plymouth – where by 1953 work was well under way on Armada Way, the great north–south avenue (pedestrian in character, with sunken gardens) running from the railway station to the Hoe – but even there, Macmillan during a visit the previous autumn noted how he ‘cd give out no news about reconstruction’, adding that ‘this “Capital Investment Programme” is really intolerable’. Given that, when it came to physical reconstruction, all the local authorities were operating under severe financial constraints imposed by the Treasury, this was undoubtedly true not just in Plymouth.

  There was, though, another general influence at work: the sheer lack by the early 1950s of any popular appetite for planning and reconstruction. ‘Why don’t they build some dwellings on that bombsite?’ was the recurrent refrain, according to a 1951 report on London. ‘The town planning says it’s to be open space. What’s the use of open space? Isn’t there the doorstep and the street? What we want is homes.’ Two years later the Labour MP for Coatbridge, near Glasgow, noted that whereas her constituents viewed housing as ‘an acute election issue’, they saw town planning as ‘a fanatic’s dream’. There was, moreover, a deep-rooted element of cultural conservatism. In Canterbury the Architects’ Journal regretfully recorded ‘a strong blend of emotionalism present which is reflected in two fears – vandalism and modernity’, a blend perhaps even more powerful in Exeter, with its ‘general feeling on the part of the public that redeveloped portions of the city should literally resemble the best in the old’.19

  How different was it in Coventry, national flagship of reconstruction? Certainly there was plenty to be done: in February 1952 a well-disposed observer, Basil Davidson, characterised the city as an ‘ugly and half-painted backcloth to huge and clamorous factories, and, for the moment little more’. Four months later, marking the start of work on the Woolworths building in what would become the Upper Precinct, the Coventry Evening Telegraph paid tribute to the perseverance shown by the planners of the emerging city centre: ‘They have kept Coventry in the lead among blitzed cities in the work of reconstruction, and the public are becoming increasingly pleased with what is being done.’ The contemporary evidence for that cosy assumption was, however, only patchy – and the unsentimental historian of Coventry’s reconstruction, Nick Tiratsoo, makes it unambiguously clear that by this time, even more than in the late 1940s, private consumption engendered far more enthusiasm than public reconstruction, with zeal for the latter declining to ‘little more than a flicker’. This essentially passive acceptance – mixed with some grumbling – was well shown during the public inquiry that began in February 1953 into the city’s Development Plan, which among many other things proposed a ground-level Inner Ring Road. More than 540 individual objections were raised, but the Inspector’s overall conclusion was that ‘considering the positive nature of the Plan, the objections of weight were not many’.

  By this time the more immediate focus was on the imminent completion of the six-storey block of shops and offices at the top of the proposed shopping precinct: Broadgate House, designed in the City Architect’s department under Donald Gibson. ‘Such a monstrosity, darkening half Broadgate, and obstructing the view and traffic from Broadgate down Hertford Street, could never have been conceived by a Coventrian who loved Coventry,’ declared ‘Old Boy’ in the local evening paper, while the paper itself tactfully sat on the fence, noting that ‘to many people its massive proportions are a symbol of Coventry’s recovery, to others they are looked upon as municipal intrusion into a sphere of business activity which might well have been left to other agencies’. A relieved council was able to announce that the building was 85 per cent let, and a former Labour Planning Minister, Lord Silkin, was invited to perform the official opening on the first Saturday in May.20

  No city was in greater need of a physical upgrade than Glasgow, especially with its desperately overcrowded housing conditions. ‘This is a very sordid town,’ Joyce Grenfell on tour wrote to a friend in 1952, ‘and one sees so many spivs, toughs and undersized cripples, tarts, pansies and flotsam and jetsam that it tends to get a girl down.’ In the early 1950s the main housing initiative was directed towards huge peripheral estates, just inside the city’s boundaries and mainly comprising three- or four-storey tenements. ‘Pollok has suffered from growing pains,’ the Glasgow Herald noted shortly before Grenfell’s lament about the scheme to the south-west that was nearing completion, with a projected population of about 45,000. ‘The building of houses has outpaced the provision of community services, particularly schools.’ By this time plans had been approved for the Drumchapel scheme to the north-west, projected as a self-contained township of ultimately almost 30,000 residents. ‘Conforming in its lay-out to the modern conceptions of community planning,’ the Glasgow Herald’s municipal correspondent wrote hopefully, ‘it is intended to be, not a “suburban sprawl”, but a place with recognised boundaries, in which a sense of community may be fostered . . .’ Soon afterwards, in November 1952, plans went through for Castlemilk, on a hilly site to the south-east and again for about 30,000 people, with work beginning in 1953. ‘The architecture and street layouts were monotonous in the extreme,’ notes the estate’s historian, ‘and the large backland areas between houses were like a wilderness enclosed by brick boxes.’ He adds that there was ‘certainly no consultation with potential tenants over the planning of Castlemilk’ and quotes Gl
asgow Corporation’s unashamed – and politically wholly understandable – mission statement: ‘To build the maximum number of houses in the shortest possible time’.

  The creation of large peripheral estates, for good or ill, was in itself no solution to the age-old problem of inner-city slums. ‘Keep it up and drive it home,’ was a stockbroker’s enthusiastic response to a hard-hitting documentary, Slums, broadcast on the Scottish Home Service in April 1953. ‘This is the most important subject in Scotland.’ A Glasgow housewife agreed: ‘We also have had rats; we have no wash-house, no drying green, not even a proper place for the rubbish bins. We know how true this programme is.’21 The emerging consensus, certainly on the part of activators, was that the solution lay – once financial resources permitted – in major slum-clearance programmes followed by comprehensive redevelopment.

  Some cities (like Liverpool, where the City Architect, Ronald Bradbury, was a vigorous proponent of slum clearance) were ahead of the curve, others still somewhat behind it. In Tory-run Newcastle, for instance, the council was petitioned in November 1952 by 458 ‘residents of dilapidated and insanitary property’ who protested ‘in the strongest of terms at the complete failure of the Housing Committee to deal adequately with the city’s housing needs, and at their entirely negative attitude with regard to slum clearance’. During the ensuing council debate, a newish Labour councillor, T. Dan Smith, objected to the way in which a previous speaker, a Tory councillor, had apparently blamed the condition of Newcastle’s slums on the people who lived in them, people who would turn ‘the best house’ into another slum: