Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  There were a couple of particularly emblematic, post-austerity moments in 1953: the opening by Gina Lollobrigida of the Moka coffee bar in Soho’s Frith Street, virtually the first café in London to have a gleaming, spluttering Gaggia coffee machine; and the British debut of the Wimpy beefburger, ‘the square meal in the round bun’, served for the first time at Wimbledon. For most people, material easement had a predominantly domestic focus. ‘Explored De Beauvoir Town and the side streets jammed in between Kingsland & Southgate Rds,’ recorded Gladys Langford after a long walk in July. ‘I may not share the tastes of the masses in window curtaining but I rejoice in that no longer is brown paper stuck over broken panes, there are no scrubby bits of net held in place by bent forks as there were when I started teaching in Hoxton in the 1930s.’24

  August was holiday time. For day trippers there was a sunny Bank Holiday weekend – on the Sunday almost 10,000 Geordies had arrived by train at Whitley Bay before 2.00 p.m., with every beach hut and deck chair long taken – while on the Kent coast there was the newly opened attraction of Ramsgate Model Village, part of that vogue for the miniature typified by Meccano sets and Airfix models. For the second year running, Anthony Heap took his wife and small son to a boarding house in nearby Broadstairs, where on the third day of their week he reflected that there were only two blots on the landscape:

  One is the deck-chair-hiring system whereby, to save the chair attendants the trouble, one has not only to collect the chair one hires at 6d a time from a certain part of the beach and carry it to wherever one wants to sit but lug it all the way back again afterwards or lose the 6d deposit one also has to pay. The other is the primitive changing room accommodation for bathers – just a yard-square cell with a stone floor and nothing to sit on. Otherwise I remain completely captivated by the sedate elegance and old world charm of this ideal seaside resort for both adults and children – for whom it caters so diligently that even the pubs have special children’s rooms.25

  That same week poor Gladys Langford, some three years after retiring as a teacher, was forced by economic necessity to start a clerical job at Educational Supplies Ltd near Drury Lane:

  11 August. Office work wears me down badly. It is so hot in the low ceilinged room and the work is so monotonous. The other clerks I have no doubt find me formidable while I find them foolish. The young ones giggle & chew, the older ones drone about their home affairs.

  12 August. My fellow workers most uninspiring – silly little girls tittering and chattering of their boys and older women talking of their children and their ailments. I get not only tired but inexpressibly bored.

  13 August. The young girls talk incessantly of films, ‘boys’ and the Royal Family while the older women chew over illnesses, the doings of husbands & children – and the Royal Family.

  Unable to bear it, she left the job a few weeks later.

  Among less exclusively female workforces, there was also the topic of sport this remarkable summer. Picking up the Matthews/Richards baton, Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton triumphed in June at the gruelling Le Mans 24-hour race, reputedly after a night on the town; over the following weeks, the 22-year-old athlete Gordon Pirie, a bank clerk from Coulsdon invariably known as ‘Puff-puff’ Pirie, attracted huge publicity with stirring performances over several different distances. Unlike the Oxford-educated Roger Bannister, the other young rising star in British athletics, Pirie made no pretence of being the gifted, effortless amateur. ‘No one committed themselves to the grind of training quite like Pirie did,’ wrote his biographer. ‘He ran, at first, four or five times a week, then daily, then, to the astonishment of his contemporaries, twice a day.’ There was also, most compelling of all, the cricket, as England sought to regain the Ashes lost to Australia in 1934. ‘A servant showed us into an end room where Colonel Luttrell was sitting watching the Test Match on television,’ recorded James Lees-Milne in June after a visit on National Trust business to Dunster Castle in Somerset. ‘He did not get up or shake hands but said quite politely, “I must see the end of the match. Sit down where you can.” So we did, and when it was over he took us round the castle with much affability.’ So too Madge Martin, no cricket-lover. ‘I find myself quite interested in Test Match now,’ she noted later in June, ‘and like listening to the commentaries.’26 The first four Tests all ended in draws, so everything rested on the fifth, starting at the Oval on Saturday, 15 August.

  A full house on the first day included Denis Thatcher, uncontactable for several hours after his wife had given birth to twins in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. Tuesday, the third day, saw the pivotal phase of the match, with Australia batting, recalled soon afterwards by A. A. Thomson, a cricket-loving civil servant:

  Word came to me from a colleague at the far end of my building who, in turn, was receiving signals from some honest workmen who had a television set in a factory on the opposite side of the road. The progress of the battle was conveyed to me by telephone – an instrument I had not previously admired – and though it started sedately, the tempo of the match perceptibly quickened. There is nothing to affect the blood pressure in a score of 59 for one, but . . . the telephone rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Fifty-nine for two. It’s Hole.’

  Pause and ping.

  ‘Hello? Who is it?’

  ‘Sixty for three. It’s Harvey.’

  ‘Hello. Who is it?’

  ‘Sixty-one for four. It’s Miller.’

  Short pause and ping-ping.

  ‘Hello? Who is it now?’

  ‘Sixty-one for five. Now it’s Morris. They’re on the run.’

  The feeling was incredible, outside and beyond human possibility. Sixty-one for five. Hassett, Hole, Harvey, Miller and Morris had travelled the broad road. We have them. These wickets had fallen so unbelievably quickly that I could no longer exercise normal patience. Five minutes passed. Nothing happened. Ten minutes. The telephone bell rang shrilly and I snatched the receiver with shaking hand.

  ‘Who is it now?’

  ‘The Foreign Office,’ replied a slightly outraged voice, ‘if you have no objection.’

  That same afternoon Judy Haines and her family were on holiday in Boscombe. ‘Several wireless sets on beach and people very friendly passing round the score,’ she noted. ‘Abbé [her husband] was suddenly missing from his deck-chair. He had gone to toilet and then, fascinated by somebody’s wireless, stayed.’

  On the Wednesday morning, with England needing only 94 to win, the fast bowler Fred Trueman arrived at the ground with his captain Len Hutton. ‘Outside the gates there was already a huge, excited throng, cheering and milling all around, and I remember seeing across the road a cockney chap frantically waving at us a newspaper placard bearing a huge drawing of the Ashes urn, surrounded in massive type by just three words: THEY ARE OURS!’ So they were, amid stirring scenes after Denis Compton in due course hit the winning stroke down to the gasometers. But for Judy Haines it proved the most bittersweet of days:

  I decided to go to Wimborne Rd Bournemouth, to buy Mum the corsets she had seen advertised. I suggested Abbé stay at home for the Test Match but he wanted to come. The particular shop was miles up the road and a long way out of Bournemouth Town. Abbé was fed up. I was annoyed as I had not wanted him to come. He had wanted to be back for the cricket commentary at 11.30. When we regained Boscombe I suggested he go ahead. He and Ione chased off while Pamela and I relaxed. We bought some embroidery (Radio Times Cover) for Ione, and purple knitting for Pamela, and I felt better. We are booked for coach ride to Salisbury. I suggested putting it off as Test Match is coming to a thrilling end. Abbé says ‘no’. Despite Kwells, girls were all but sick, and while we were at Salisbury it rained. Test Match and Ashes won by England. We wanted to hear John Arlott’s summing up at 10.15. I reminded Abbé at 10.10 but he let it go, not wishing to disturb the other guests. In mentioning my disappointment they all expressed theirs. I was so miserable in bed I couldn’t help sobbing and then had a good cry. Felt better afte
r that.27

  12

  Moral Courage

  Ashes to ashes – the day after England had regained the urn, and less than a fortnight after the Russian leader Georgy Malenkov had told the Supreme Soviet that ‘the United States no longer has a monopoly of the hydrogen bomb’, Pravda reported that the Soviet Union had indeed tested a hydrogen bomb, with an explosion showing that the H-bomb’s power was ‘many times greater than the power of atomic bombs’. Humour was one response to this alarming development – ‘the atom bomb with its familiar rococo mushroom plumage will still be useful in minor engagements’, reflected the cricket-loving Bernard Hollowood in Punch – while most people simply got on with their lives and, more or less successfully, tried not to think about it.

  Certainly the Cold War remained, despite the recent end of the Korean War, an obstinate reality, taking a new cultural form in October with the first issue of the monthly magazine Encounter. Edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, it was an explicitly anti-Communist organ (secretly funded by the CIA) of wide intellectual range and high literary quality. At a less rarefied level, Mass-Observation found during the autumn that although twice as many people in Britain were anti- as were pro-Russian, there persisted ‘the identification of the Russian people with the “we” group . . . the innocent victims of the machinations of the mysterious “they” ’. There were, moreover, mixed feelings towards Americans: admiration for their ‘generosity’, yes, but also resentment about their ‘big-headedness’ and for being, most damning of faults, ‘all talk’. But predictably, whether towards Russians or Americans, the most common attitude expressed to M-O was that old, deeply insular favourite, ‘no opinion’.

  Sport for its part did not suddenly stop distracting attention from the momentous issues. ‘As usual of course,’ warned the Shetland Times eight days after Pravda’s announcement, ‘there are the critics who predict dire results at the hands of an Orkney team,’ as the footballers of the two islands prepared to contest that afternoon the Milne Cup. Shetland had not won on Orkney soil since 1929, but on a wet Friday afternoon at Bignold Park, with all places of business in Kirkwall closed, 3,540 spectators saw, in the regretful words of the Orkney Herald, ‘the Orcadians humbled 3–1 by a much faster and cleverer Shetland side’. Kirkwall City Pipe Band did the musical honours; Shetland’s captain, the stopper centre-half Tommy (‘Blondie’) Newman, received the Cup from the local Liberal MP, Jo Grimond; and on Saturday, still recovering from the Friday evening reception and dance, ‘several hundred Orcadians were at the pier’ to give the Shetland party (just over a hundred) ‘a good-humoured send-off and to have a farewell glimpse of the Milne Cup’. Three weeks later there was another, higher-profile annual ritual with the Last Night of the Proms, as usual conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent and as usual in front of, according to The Times, ‘an outsize audience keyed up as if for a Cup Final’. The BBC’s head of music had controversially omitted Sir Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, an old favourite, from the printed programme – but such was the public outcry that a shortened version was included as an encore. ‘As clappers in the horn-pipe, the audience showed a disregard for the conductor’s beat that would have won any orchestral player the sack.’1

  The material world was continuing to improve. ‘I began my expedition among the bulging shops of Notting Hill Gate and Paddington,’ reported the News Chronicle’s David Malbert in early September about a shopping trip round London that revealed the extent to which food rationing was informally if not yet officially ending:

  In a big provision store I bought 1 lb of best grilling steak for 4s; ½ lb of margarine; 2 lb of sugar and 1 lb of back of bacon for 4s 10d. The subject of ration books did not crop up . . .

  I went out to the Old Kent Road. ‘Will 4 lb do?’ the grocer asked when I mentioned sugar. ‘I’ve no ration book,’ I explained. He laughed. ‘That doesn’t matter. Never use ’em now.’ In three other shops in the district I bought more margarine, sugar, butter and best bacon. At two others my umbrella was regarded with slight mistrust and I was reminded: ‘Sorry, it’s rationed.’

  Mollie Panter-Downes confirmed the trend. ‘Butchers for some time now,’ she observed later that month, ‘have been sticking up signs saying, “Anyone served with anything on sale” in their windows,’ adding that ‘that strange, prized symbol of pre-war good living – pure-white bread – has, for the first time since the war, turned up in the shops for those who can afford to pay more for it than for the subsidised semi-white national loaf’. There was also a signal moment on the 28th. ‘Sugar rationing is over,’ recorded Marian Raynham. ‘That is wonderful. Now I will have more brown, dem, & some lump. I mostly had granulated because it goes farther.’ It was, in Panter-Downes’s words, ‘one more move toward making a nice little bonfire of ration books’.

  The cultural standard of living stayed, from a Reithian perspective, disappointingly poor. ‘It appealed strongly to a minority only and was consequently given the low Reaction Index of 54,’ noted BBC audience research after the second act of T. S. Eliot’s new play, The Confidential Clerk, had gone out live in late August. ‘The most frequent complaints were that the play seemed difficult, wordy and “highbrow”.’ A viewer was quoted as saying: ‘Couldn’t for the life of me pick the story up.’ By contrast, the return soon afterwards of the comedy How Do You View? (‘How do you view? Are you frightfully well? You are? Oh, good show!’) won an RI of 76. ‘One has only to look at Terry-Thomas and one feels a laugh coming,’ declared one enthusiastic viewer, another that ‘this was grand stuff; interesting, very amusing and clean’. Squeaky clean also were Rag, Tag and Bobtail, the latest addition to the Watch with Mother portfolio, but Nella Last in Barrow was not so sure about the whole phenomenon after listening to her next-door neighbour Mrs Atkinson complain about how her little granddaughter was now always wanting to rush home to watch Children’s Hour. ‘As she talked,’ reflected Last, ‘I saw plainly how T.V. must be changing a lot of people’s habits.’ J. B. Priestley had no doubts about the perniciousness. ‘Because people spend their evenings watching idiotic parlour games on TV or Chu Chin Chow on ice,’ he declared in the first of his ‘Thoughts in the Wilderness’ columns in the New Statesman, ‘this does not mean that the last glimmer of intuitive perception has been dowsed, though after a few more years of mass communication on this level the crowd may be permanently half-witted.’ His next column, later in September, was a lengthy, fiercely anti-American diatribe against the mass media and how it was creating a new world – ‘a world I dislike intensely’.2

  Almost everyone on the left agreed that an improved educational system was pivotal to the country’s future health, whether moral and/or socio-economic. ‘The child who lives in Merioneth has eight times more chance of going to a grammar school than has a child in Gateshead,’ asserted Alice Bacon at Labour’s conference at Margate this autumn, calling for an end to ‘the grammar school gamble’, while Jennie Lee wanted the party to ‘put all its enthusiasm and skill into comprehensive schools’. Moreover, although the party had for some time been theoretically committed to the comprehensive principle, there was also considerable – if far from unanimous – rank-and-file enthusiasm for the cause expressed at the conference. Not that it was a cause likely to proceed smoothly so long as Florence Horsbrugh was Minister of Education. Over the winter she largely resisted attempts by Labour-controlled local authorities in London, Coventry and elsewhere to go comprehensive and in particular ensured that, in London at least (where at this point eight comprehensives were being built and four more were on the drawing board), no existing grammar school was lost. One of the planned four was Holland Park Comprehensive, notwithstanding strenuous objections (publicly supported by John Betjeman) from the wealthy residents of Campden Hill, Kensington. ‘An educational abortion, a vast factory, mass-producing units for the prefabrication of the classless dictatorship of the proletariat,’ ran a typical super-Nimby cry of despair to the local paper.3

  Increasingly, a cen
tral plank of the pro-comprehensive case was that the eleven-plus method of selection for grammar schools was not just cruel and divisive but also inefficient in terms of measuring intelligence. A key figure was Brian Simon, a Communist who as a youngish teacher at Salford Grammar School in the late 1940s had been much struck by how the handful of boys each year who passed a ‘transfer’ examination from the secondary modern to the grammar then flourished more than some of the original eleven-plus passers. ‘Did this mean, given the opportunity, that there were potentially hundreds of 11-plus failures perfectly capable of doing well at grammar school?’ was how he recalled his thinking. During the early 1950s, by now based at Leicester University’s School of Education, he started to conduct research leading in late 1953 to a short but highly focused study Intelligence Testing and the Comprehensive School. Even the pro-selection Times Educational Supplement conceded that it was ‘a formidable indictment of the theory and practice of intelligence testing’, while John Garrett, headmaster of Bristol Grammar School and a virtuoso publicist for the grammar-school system, wrote in the New Statesman that the case ‘deserves respect and demands an answer’. Simon’s ultimate conclusion was that intelligence testing essentially tested the differences of social class and that it was time to concentrate, without selection, on the educability of the ordinary child.