Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  ‘They are very high-minded, very sincere – but so were Cromwell and his Puritans,’ countered the Postmaster General, Earl de la Warr, about the government’s critics. ‘These people probably feel that they could run our lives extremely well. But I do not think the British people have the slightest intention of living like that . . .’ Later that afternoon, the Wembley humiliation over, the Archbishop of Canterbury proclaimed his hostility to the very notion of more programmes on the nation’s screens: ‘I ask: Is it wise to multiply opportunities of spending time in this way at the expense of other possible occupations for reasonable and intelligent persons? So I ask: Do we really need more television? And my answer is, so far: No, we do not.’

  Next day, at the end of a debate that had seen the biggest turnout of peers since the American loan debate in 1946, the government comfortably won the vote by 157 to 87. The Manchester Guardian – hostile to the breach of the BBC’s monopoly – dubbed the Tory peers as the government’s ‘herd of dumb, driven cattle’. Soon afterwards, the Commons had their own two-day debate. It ran along predictable enough lines, with perhaps Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s the most memorable contribution. ‘The burden of our argument,’ he declared, was that ‘under commercial television there is no room for those who are in television because they believe in its capacity for improving itself in that medium and making a programme for its own sake.’ And after asserting that ‘any programme on commercial television of any country is like a wounded man who has to be carried on a stretcher by his sponsors one at each end’ – on which principle ‘we are bound to get more and more programmes appealing to mass audiences’ – he went on to warn that ‘Ted Ray and Terry-Thomas are going to have to look to their laurels against the canned entertainment programme of Bob Hope and Jack Benny.’18 Again, the government won the vote, and the Reithian nightmare moved one stage closer.

  If the herbivorian establishment shuddered, there was reassurance in December for the carnivores. Over the autumn it had emerged that two of the financial world’s outsiders, Charles Clore and the property developer Harold Samuel, were between them seeking to engineer the takeover of the Savoy group of hotels, including Claridges and the Berkeley as well as the Savoy itself. This was a source of considerable consternation to many leading City figures. Not only did they (like Churchill) greatly value the hospitality of these places, but the Clore/Samuel move was an ominous sign that the aggressive takeover bid was becoming a regular part of financial life, an assault in fact on the accepted norm of keeping things in the club. However, through some complicated manoeuvres masterminded by the Savoy’s Hugh Wontner and much abetted by the stockbroking firm Cazenove, the bid was thwarted. The dominant mood in the City was one of relief – a mood encouraged by the Bank of England, whose Governor, Kim Cobbold, had been strongly urging the banks ‘to use special caution in respect of any invitations coming before them which appear to be connected with these take-over operations’, on the grounds that ‘in some at least there would seem to be a considerable speculative element’. Accordingly, with the bankers compliant, the nasty, unpredictable threat of hostile takeovers was for the moment stayed.

  An altogether less resistible rise under way by 1953 was, against the helpful background of full employment, that of what would eventually become known as the fifth estate. ‘The most warm-hearted movement in the whole of this country,’ was how Wedgwood Benn on 11 December described the trade-union movement to an Any Questions? audience in Waterlooville, a statement greeted with repeated laughter. Three days later the warm-hearted National Union of Railwaymen called, in the outraged words of the journalist and television personality W. J. Brown, ‘a strike on the railways to start next Sunday – 4 days before Xmas day!’ He added that ‘the Railwaymen have, as a matter of fact, a good case on wages’, but that ‘the choice of this date will put the whole country up against them’. ‘Back to 1926’ was the Financial Times’s dramatic headline, with the paper declaring on Tuesday the 15th that ‘there can be no pretence that the railwaymen’s conduct is anything but extremely irresponsible’.

  Wednesday evening, however, saw a dramatic intervention. From the outset of his return to power, Churchill had been determined to keep on cordial terms with organised labour, a determination reinforced in recent months by increasing signs of industrial militancy, and this dispute was no exception. ‘We cannot have a railway strike, it would be so disturbing to all of us,’ he flatly informed his Chancellor, Rab Butler. ‘You will never get home, nobody will be able to see their wives.’ Churchill knew he could rely on his Minister of Labour, the emollient Sir Walter Monckton, and shortly before midnight Monckton compelled General Sir Brian Robertson, the retired army administrator recently appointed to take charge of the British Transport Commission, to yield to the union demands. ‘Walter and I have settled the railway strike so you won’t be troubled any more,’ Churchill over the phone informed the absent Butler. ‘On what terms have you settled it?’ asked Butler. ‘Theirs, old cock!’ was the insouciant reply. ‘We did not like to keep you up.’ Monckton would subsequently claim that it had been Churchill and Butler who had been ‘weak’, wanting ‘peace at any price’. But either way, there was no doubt about the Churchillian dictat.

  ‘Monckton has done wonderfully well,’ was Macmillan’s immediate reaction. ‘There will be quite a price to pay – but we all had the impression that public opinion favoured the railwaymen.’ Most of the press did not disagree. ‘Peace With Honour’ was the Conservative-supporting Sheffield Telegraph’s headline; the FT, though conceding that the settlement was undeniably inflationary and liable to open the floodgates to other unions, insisted that ‘managements as a whole must redouble their efforts to increase productivity’ and that ‘in the last resort, theirs is the responsibility’; while The Times, in a bland editorial on ‘Better Railways’, refrained from outright criticism of the government and hoped that ‘this time the promises of higher productivity are not illusory’. Only the Economist really put the boot in, using terms like ‘funk’, ‘retreat from reality’ and, most pejorative of all, ‘Munich’.19 Over the years it would become one of the mainstays of Thatcherite contemporary history that the government’s craven climbdown in December 1953 had set the tone for the next quarter-century of industrial relations – a version given added teeth by Andrew Roberts’s coruscating 1994 essay on Monckton in his Eminent Churchillains. But as Churchill himself had observed, most people just wanted to get home, not least five days before Christmas.

  For this year’s Christmas film, there was a runaway winner. On that busy last Wednesday in November, Rank held a sneak preview of Trouble in Store – Norman Wisdom’s screen debut – at the Gaumont, Camden Town. The first big laugh (in a screenplay originally written by Michael Foot’s wife Jill Craigie) came at the sight of Jerry Desmonde in his limousine and little Norman being left behind on his bike, and at the end the audience cheered and clapped. ‘If you don’t laugh at Norman’s antics as the downtrodden worker in a big store, trying to get promotion to a window dresser, there is something wrong with your sense of fun,’ insisted the Daily Mirror’s reviewer some three weeks later. Not all the critics were completely bowled over. Although acknowledging that ‘he is a funny, endearing little man with a big future’, Virginia Graham in the Spectator thought Wisdom’s style overly ‘knockabout’ and wanted him to learn from the performance in the film of Margaret Rutherford, her humour ‘a blend of tones and half-tones graded with infinite cunning’. The Times too, though praising ‘an unsophisticated British farce with few inhibitions and, mercifully, no ideas above its station’, thought it ‘a mistaken kindness’ to compare Wisdom, as the Evening Standard had done, to the early Charlie Chaplin: ‘His ill-fitting suit, his losing battles against authority, his air of battered chivalry outwardly support the comparison, but as yet Mr Wisdom relies more on grotesque appearance and manufactured situation than inner inspiration.’

  Such reservations mattered not a jot as the film (featuring Wisdom’s hit song ‘D
on’t Laugh At Me’) was given a blanket release on the vast Odeon circuit and over the next month broke almost all box-office records, including at 51 out of the 67 London cinemas where it played. ‘The most astonishing phenomenon in British post-war entertainment,’ was how Picture Post at the end of January called ‘the little man’ with ‘the wondering face and the battered destiny’. Wisdom at this time was also starring every night at the huge Empress Hall, London, in the panto Sinbad the Sailor on Ice. ‘He hardly does anything at all, except run about on the enormous stage and in the aisles, shaking an impotent fist at the audience,’ noted the magazine. ‘He skates a little, sings a little, drives about in an old yellow car. Yet whatever he does, or fails to do, the public responds ecstatically.’20

  The balance between two rival media was shifting irrevocably. ‘It was a T.V. Christmas, which isn’t my idea of Christmas,’ recorded Judy Haines on Christmas Day, but not long afterwards she was enjoying ‘a very fine performance’ by Googie Withers in The Deep Blue Sea. ‘I don’t understand unfaithfulness in marriage though & feel it is unnecessary.’ The New Year saw the first weather forecasters on television, the Yorkshireman George Cowling and the Londoner T. H. Clifton. ‘Both have a nice sense of humour, though Mr Clifton sometimes forgets to relax,’ was one viewer’s response. ‘But he and his colleague are so understanding, and have made up to me for all the affronts I suffered in the old days when I listened to the evening forecasts for farmers and shipping and we poor housewives were forgotten.’ About the same time, BBC’s audience research reflected how the new series of Have a Go! had had ‘an audience of 30%’, which was ‘as relatively good in these days of television competition as the previous series in 1951/2’ – adding not only that ‘the reaction of listeners was more mixed than in the past’ but that ‘there were complaints of staleness in the material and of some uneasiness of manner in Wilfred Pickles himself’.

  One should not exaggerate the shift – ‘the most relaxed and comforting time of my day’, was how Madge Martin in January referred to ‘my precious “Woman’s Hour” ’ – but at the end of that month there was just a whiff of the last hurrah about The National Radio Awards of 1953–4, sponsored by the Daily Mail and going out live on the Light Programme from the Scala Theatre. Franklin Engelmann was the MC, Sidney Torch and his Orchestra supplied the music, and Gilbert Harding almost inevitably won the award (voted for by listeners) as Personality of the Year. ‘The Most Entertaining Programme’ was a tied vote between The Archers and Take It From Here, with the latter’s stars doing a special Glums sketch for the ceremony. One exchange had a particular resonance:

  DICK: Dad, Eth doesn’t like wireless. We’re not having one in our home.

  JIM: (AGHAST) You’re not having a wireless? Oh, son, a home’s not a home without a wireless. Think of the long winter evenings . . . ! What are you going to listen to while Eth’s talking?

  JUNE: I think wireless is just a drug, Mr Glum.

  JIM: Oh, that’s nice, isn’t it? So me and my family are just drug-haddocks! You listen to me, Eth – wireless is a – is a – a modern miracle, it is.

  JUNE: But there’s other forms of entertainment, Mr Glum.

  JIM: Who’s talking about entertainment? I’m talking about the BBC! The BBC is part of the English heritage. Like suet pudding and catarrh.

  The future lay elsewhere, and Picture Post had already predicted its ‘bright stars of Television in 1954’. They included Morecambe and Wise (‘streamlined patter and natural, apparently oblivious, craziness’, but no Christian names given), Benny Hill (‘combines personal charm with a gift for mimicry and self-effacing comedy’) and Billie Whitelaw (‘made an immediate impact on viewers when Caryl Doncaster cast her last year as the young wife in the series, The Pattern of Marriage’). ‘She takes direction well,’ Doncaster told the magazine, ‘and she has a quality of sincerity which is essential for television. You can’t use tricks on TV – and get away with it.’21

  By early 1954 two national champions were in trouble. ‘Awful about that Comet crash in Mediterranean,’ noted Marian Raynham on 12 January, two days after all 35 on board had perished off the island of Elba. BOAC had no alternative but to suspend all Comet services while technical examinations took place. ‘There could be no doubt of the shock it gave everybody,’ reflected a melancholic Raymond Streat a week after the crash:

  It was not merely that some people had been killed, though that always shocks everybody’s feelings. It was the awful thought that the Comet aeroplane might not be the successful achievement of British scientists and engineers which we have all believed it to be in the past few years. In a very special way it has comforted us as a country and a people during a period in which so many emblems and tokens of our former power and glory had been stripped away from us.

  The other troubled champion was Churchill. The Daily Mirror had seldom been friendly, but its headline on the 26th, ‘Should Churchill Retire?’, took its attacks to a new level. Worse, because less predictable, occurred a week later, on 3 February, with the appearance of the latest Punch. On one page was a large, striking drawing (unsigned, but by Leslie Illingworth) of an aged, weary Churchill, with the caption, ‘Man goeth forth to his work and to his labours until the evening’; opposite was a signed piece by the editor, Malcolm Muggeridge, about ‘Bellarius’, reputedly an emperor in ninth-century Byzantium. ‘The spectacle of him clutching wearily at all the appurtenances and responsibilities of an authority he could no longer fully exercise,’ he wrote in Gibbonian style, ‘was to his admirers infinitely sorrowful, and to his enemies infinitely derisory.’ The magazine in the past year had sharpened up under Muggeridge, but this was something else. ‘Punch goes everywhere,’ an infinitely hurt Churchill next day told his doctor Lord Moran. ‘I shall have to retire if this sort of thing goes on. I must make a speech in a fortnight’s time; it is necessary when things like this happen.’22

  13

  Can You Afford It, Boy?

  Things were moving on the literary front. ‘ “Can’t you tell me, Mr Lumley, just what it is that you don’t like about the rooms?” ’ was the opening sentence, set in the dingy Midland town of ‘Stotwell’, of John Wain’s first novel Hurry on Down, published in October 1953. ‘There was no mistaking the injured truculence in the landlady’s voice, nor her expression of superhuman patience about to snap at last. Charles very nearly groaned aloud. Must he explain, point by point, why he hated living there? Her husband’s cough in the morning, the way the dog barked every time he went in or out, the greasy mats in the hall? Obviously it was impossible.’ Wain’s own background was solidly middle-class – son of a Potteries dentist, Oxford, lecturer in English at Reading University – but his hero Charles Lumley was, in the words of the TLS, ‘in flight from his parents, from academic culture and gentility, from a manner of speech and a way of living’. The review quoted his resolution as a window cleaner – one of several defiantly non-middle-class jobs during a series of picaresque, unmetropolitan adventures – to ‘form no roots in his new stratum of society, but remain independent of class, forming roots only with impersonal things such as places and seasons’. The novel’s reception was broadly positive – ‘Mr Wain, in his grim and gritty and tough-minded way, can be very funny indeed,’ reckoned Walter Allen in the New Statesman – but some reviewers could not refrain from moralising. ‘Mr Wain endows his hero with an obscure desire to get outside society, or to live in it without belonging to it, or something of the sort,’ observed Graham Hough in the Listener. ‘He has not thought very hard about this, and I don’t think you need either.’ For Geoffrey Bullough in the Birmingham Post, the ‘weakness’ of a ‘very amusing’ book lay in the hero’s ‘drifting negativeness’. Still, The Times was able to offer reassurance. The hero ‘gets mixed up in some very queer adventures indeed’, it noted, before adding that ‘this is not a sordid book’.1

  The following month another grammar-school product, Dylan Thomas, died in New York. Barely two months later, on Monday, 25 J
anuary 1954, his ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood, had its British premiere on the Third Programme, starring the young Richard Burton in the part Thomas himself would have played. It proved, despite or perhaps because of its plotlessness, a great moment in radio history. ‘I was spellbound from start to finish,’ declared the Listener’s Martin Armstrong, by ‘the gradually unfolding impression of a living community’ (a small fishing town in south Wales called Llareggub, spelled forwards) and a ‘dazzling command of language which kept the listener in a state of delighted surprise’. William Salter in the New Statesman found it ‘lyrical, impassioned and funny, an Our Town given universality’, asserting that ‘by comparison with anything broadcast for a very long time, it exploded on the air like a bomb – but a life-giving bomb’. Listeners mainly agreed, with the broadcast getting ‘the exceptionally high Appreciation Index of 81’ and being ‘received with a rare enthusiasm’. ‘True,’ the audience research report added, ‘there was a small minority to whom it seemed unedifying, verbose or confusing. But for most of the audience, the wit, vigour and beauty of the writing combined with a flawless production to make a memorable broadcast.’ Sadly, Thomas’s home town of Laugharne was unable to receive the broadcast, and the Welsh Home Service declined to repeat it, on the grounds that it was not ‘for family or home listening’. ‘The chapel influence,’ plausibly reckons one of Thomas’s biographers, ‘balked at suggestions of Welsh hypocrisy and saw only malicious satire.’2