If the Movement was indeed a movement, arguably three defining characteristics stood out: a zealous heterosexuality, with little taste for effeminacy, let alone homosexuality; an instinctive dislike of Modernism; and, especially on the part of Amis and Larkin, what Davie would many years later regretfully call an ‘aggressive insularity’. There were also similarities in background, immortalised soon afterwards by Philip Oakes’s ‘Identikit’ 1950s writer: ‘Born: Coketown 1925. Parents: lower middle-class. Educated: local council school, grammar school and university . . . Enthusiasms: Orwell, jazz, Doctor Leavis . . .’ Jazz – traditional, not modern – was important, and this autumn saw, at Raynes Park County Grammar School, the formation of a Jazz Club, though only after the headmaster had ‘expressed a wish’ that its members ‘might later gravitate to the serious side of music’. The notes in the school magazine suggested somewhat hesitant beginnings: ‘Programmes this term have included a personal choice, an excellently illustrated history of jazz, and a rather controversial programme of music by [Gerry] Mulligan and [Stan] Kenton. It has only been possible to arrange programmes for alternate weeks, owing to the lack of programme material, which in turn is the result of members either having no records to illustrate their topic or being too shy anyway.’2
Not all grammar-school boys were jazz-lovers, and in October one of them, the first of his family to go to university, went up to Oxford, still dominated by public-school boys. The awful truth hit Alan Bennett the moment he entered the college lodge:
It was piled high with trunks; trunks pasted with ancient labels, trunks that had holidayed in Grand Hotels, travelled first-class on liners, trunks painted with four, nay even five, initials. They were the trunks of fathers that were now the trunks of sons, trunks of generations . . . I had two shameful Antler suitcases that I had gone with my mother to buy at Schofields in Leeds – an agonizing process, since it had involved her explaining to the shop assistant, a class my mother always assumed were persons of some refinement, that the cases were for going to Oxford with on a scholarship and were these the kind of thing? They weren’t. One foot across the threshold of the college lodge and I saw it, and hurried to hide them beneath my cold bed.
The following month, a public-school boy who had come down from Oxford four years earlier returned for a weekend. ‘The University seemed young, offensively callous,’ noted an unimpressed John Fowles. ‘On Sunday morning, little groups of earnest young men in dark suits and college scarves – the scarf seems sadly ubiquitous now, though the uniform can surely never be a symbol of freedom of thought – hymnbooks in hand. An oppressive air of religiosity everywhere, everywhere . . .’
Class was as pervasive as ever. ‘He carries rather too much of a chip on his shoulder about the middle classes,’ reflected Hugh Gaitskell in early October about one of Labour’s rising MPs, George Brown, son of a Southwark van driver. ‘But his record in speech and working is excellent. He has unlimited courage and plenty of sense.’ Soon afterwards, on Friday the 8th, this class warrior was on Any Questions? at the Town Hall, Lydney. ‘We stayed at the Feathers Hôtel,’ recorded a seasoned fellow-panellist, Lady Violet Bonham Carter. ‘Ralph Wightman and Mrs Wightman rolled up later – & at dinner [ie before the programme] a new member of the Team – George Brown – Attlee-ite Labour who was Minister of Works . . . Everyone was agreeable to him – but he was obviously lacking in “touch” – or any kind of “amenity” or intercourse.’ Then came the programme itself, as ever going out live: ‘George Brown’s “form” cld not I thought have been worse. He made 2 really “bad form” howlers – one a quite gratuitous & irrelevant insult to the Liberal Party – the other an allusion to my age!’ The transcript reveals that his crack against the Liberals was that ‘they hardly have any conference worthy of the name’, while he did indeed make a jocose reference to Lady Violet’s ‘present age of 26 or thereabouts’. Yet more unpardonable was still to come. ‘When we returned to the hôtel (our BBC hosts having left us) & we sat up talking he hectored & harangued us & addressed me repeatedly as “my dear Violet”. I was frozen – but did not I fear freeze him. I have never before – in the course of an unsheltered life, spent among all sorts & conditions of men – met anyone so completely un-house-trained.’3
Brown was on the right of the Labour Party, at a time of continuing discord between Bevanites and Gaitskellites. ‘How can you support a public school boy from Winchester against the man born in the back streets of Tredegar?’ Bevan in June had furiously asked Sam Watson, leader of the Durham miners, about their decision to support Gaitskell, not himself, for the party’s vacant treasurership. Gaitskell duly won it, announced in late September at the party conference in Scarborough, during which Bevan as usual spoke at the Tribune rally:
This took place [recorded the pro-Bevan Crossman] in a ghastly hall with dim lights and an audience fanning out all round into the darkness. Typically enough, Peggy Duff [tireless left-wing campaigner] hadn’t arranged the chairs on the platform or tested the microphones, which looked like broken chrysanthemum stems. You pulled them up to your level and they had a brilliant habit of slowly sinking down again in sight of the audience.
When Nye started, I don’t know what he had intended to say, but he spent forty minutes in a long attack on the press, prefaced by a statement that he never believed in personal attacks. Then there was a wild sloshing at unnamed, terrible, adding-machine leaders and a tremendous attack on trade union leaders. It was all very incoherent until the last fourteen minutes, when he did some excellent stuff on foreign policy. There was some quick applause, people began to file out and then the ‘Red Flag’ was sung, not very satisfactorily.
The ‘adding-machine’ passage was when Bevan bitterly declared that he now knew that ‘the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation’, even ‘if he sees suffering, privation or injustice’, for to do so ‘would be evidence of lack of proper education or absence of self-control’. This may well have been in reference to Attlee, but it was widely assumed to be Gaitskell, thereafter indelibly associated with the description. Gaitskell contented himself with the briefest of ripostes in his first post-conference newspaper article – ‘by the way we do need arithmetic for social progress’ – and Crossman privately reflected that ‘the Right wrongly think that Nye has finished himself’.4
The increasingly troubled industrial scene was starting to attract at least as much attention as the political. ‘No newspapers today,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton on 11 October. ‘A strike. They strike, the dockers strike, everybody wants to strike.’ Two days later, Anthony Heap took up the chorus: ‘Strikes, strikes, strikes. First the docks, then the newspapers, now the buses, one sixth of which failed to run today.’ And after another two days, Raynham again: ‘The strikes go on, the bus & dockers strikes. It is very serious.’
In the event, it was the docks that were the most serious concern, with Merseyside members of the giant Transport and General Workers’ Union unofficially supporting – to the undisguised fury of their fiercely right-wing, anti-Communist national leader, Arthur Deakin – the striking London dockers who belonged to the more left-wing National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers. That union was, Deakin publicly declared, ‘led by a moronic crowd of irresponsible adventurers’. It was generally a very bitter dispute, turning on the question of whether overtime was compulsory, and on the 29th it emerged that the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Noel Bowater, was cancelling a Mansion House banquet in aid of the Docklands Settlement – essentially a charity for children in the Docklands area – ‘in view of the attitude of the dock workers’. In fact, following a government-appointed court of inquiry which recognised the need to require ‘reasonable overtime’ in the docks, the end was nigh, with the dockers returning to work at the start of November. Just before they did so, Crossman went to speak at a meeting at Huyton, Harold Wilson’s Merseyside constituency. ‘As I entered the door,’ he re
corded, ‘five enormous dockers stood towering over me, saying, “What have you written in the Sunday Pic about £30 a week for dockers?” Apparently, next door to my column there was a news story saying that, by working overtime to make up for the strike the dockers might earn as much as £30.’ Crossman added that both there and at Toxteth, where he had spoken earlier in the day, all the party officials, dockers to a man, had spoken about Deakin ‘in terms which are almost impossible to reproduce, since they clearly regard him as the greatest single enemy of the people’.
Who had won? ‘My dear Walter, hooray – hooray – many congratulations on yet another triumph,’ an exultant Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, wrote to the Minister of Labour, Sir Walter Monckton, while Harold Macmillan saw the outcome as, with any luck, ‘a set-back for the Communists and “fellow-travellers” ’. But for an increasingly prominent dockers’ leader in London, the fiery Jack Dash, establishing that ‘never again could the dock employers threaten compulsory overtime’ was ‘perhaps the greatest victory won by the united action of the portworkers for fifty years’. The real loser, according to the leading socialist intellectual G.D.H. Cole, was Deakin’s ‘unmanageably huge and clumsy’ T&G, and he drew a wider lesson for the trade-union movement as whole:
The centralisation of collective bargaining has done a good deal to encourage the belief among leaders that they own their members, rather than are owned by them. If trade unions are to be truly democratic bodies, they will need to devise new ways of fostering free activity at branch and workplace levels in order to offset the atrophy of local life which is all too marked a feature of current trade union practice.
In the wake of the dispute, the News Chronicle’s industrial correspondent, Geoffrey Goodman, spent three weeks touring all the docks, in the process discovering ‘astonishing inefficiencies, poor management bordering on the absurd, corrupt trade union practices and a bewildered workforce’. At his insistence, before the paper printed his three-part series, Goodman put his findings to Deakin: ‘He eyed me with great suspicion and demanded to know my sources for what he regarded as “scandalous inventions”. Of course he knew I would not, could not, divulge any names, so he simply dismissed the whole business as a “load of malicious anti-T and G lies”, and warned me against publishing the material. The paper ignored his threats . . .’
Goodman added, in his recollections of covering the tangled post-war industrial scene, that a major problem was ‘the casual, lazy assumption’, including on the part of ‘the average news desk’, that ‘all disputes and certainly all unofficial strikes, were the work of the Communist Party and its army of industrial activists’ – usually an unjustified assumption. Still, the Communist rhetoric could be ambitious enough. On the day the dockers returned to work, the party’s West Ham North branch considered a report stating that the aim for the coming year was ‘to organise 15 comrades who must be capable of political leadership and Marxist approach to working-class problems’, which if achieved ‘could lead to our Branch becoming of the size, character and vigilance necessary to lead the people to political power in West Ham and indeed to be the key to the winning of the Labour Movement for a decisive end to capitalist power in Great Britain’.5
Yet Albion in 1954 was no longer – if it ever had been – in a convertible state. ‘Well-dressed young mothers air their bonny babies, well-washed matrons and healthy looking men pace the streets,’ had been Gladys Langford’s experience a few weeks earlier in the East End as she walked ‘the length of Commercial Street’, which she had known half a century earlier. ‘ “Itchy Park” is no longer a weed-ridden waste but a well-planned garden and its benches are no longer tenanted by lousy tramps and aged crones. Well-dressed young housewives wheel fat infants along its paths.’ That same Saturday, 9 October, Nella Last in Barrow was chatting to the manager of the local ‘Co-op Furnishing Shop’, and he told her, ‘I can sell more washing machines & these new “steam” electric irons than anything else.’ White goods mattered, as an unwell Judy Haines reflected on the last Monday, ie wash day, of November: ‘Thanked God and Abbé for the washing machine – but I let it over-run! Mopped up half a bucket of water.’ Apart from some concerns about inflation, running at around 3.5 per cent, the economic indicators for the year had been undeniably good – industrial production, employment, exports and consumer expenditure all continuing to rise – and in mid-December the finance subcommittee of Labour’s National Executive Committee discussed, at Crossman’s suggestion, ‘the problems of Socialism in a boom’:
Gaitskell was in the chair and immediately suggested that we should ask the opinions of four representative economists on the prospects of the boom’s continuing. After some consultation with Harold Wilson, Gaitskell named Richard Kahn, Austin Robinson and Sir Donald MacDougall. I myself was baffled as to what these eminent gentlemen are to do and, as a division bell rang at that moment, I asked Gaitskell in the lobby. He explained to me that, from his strict economic point of view, the sort of questions I was putting were irrelevant: I was talking about a psychological boom, not an economists’ boom.
‘He seemed to feel,’ added Crossman even more tellingly, ‘that I should be content with this reply.’6
Radio still largely meant BBC radio, but one evening this autumn Gladys Langford rather surprisingly went to ‘the Lucozade sponsored Quiz programme run by Radio Luxembourg’. The compère was Hughie Green – ‘a poor comedian I thought’ – and Langford was struck by how he ‘in many instances practically put the words for answers into the contestants’ mouths’. As for those around her, ‘the majority of the audience was of the charwoman and “Teddy boy” type’. On the BBC itself, this was the autumn that the Goons, with their fifth series, were at their hugely popular zenith. Certainly it was the high point of John Lennon’s addiction to them, an addiction that involved a mastery over all the voices and catchphrases, not least Bluebottle’s ‘Dirty rotten swine!’ Episodes in the series included ‘The Whistling Spy Enigma’, ‘The Affair of the Lone Banana’ and ‘Dishonoured, or The Fall of Neddie Seagoon’, but probably the most celebrated went out on 12 October, three days after Lennon’s fourteenth birthday. ‘The Goons (Home) have been talking, rather confusedly, about batter puddings,’ was the somewhat starchy reaction of the Listener’s drama critic J. C. Trewin to ‘The Dreaded Batter-Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea)’, written wholly by Spike Milligan. ‘There were sharp crackles, “By the light of a passing glue factory I saw that Eccles was wearing only one boot”; and only once or twice I heard a curious hissing noise and knew that my teeth were bared.’ A crucial part of The Goon Show mix, and presumably appeal, was its jibes against such sacrosanct institutions as the church, the army and the Foreign Office – jibes ‘embedded in the madness’, in Philip Norman’s apt words, ‘like hooks in blubber’. But late in the year, in ‘Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest’, they went too far by including a banquet scene in which Churchill (impersonated by Peter Sellers) was under the table ‘looking for a blasted telegram’, prompting the BBC to ban forthwith any further such impressions.
From Tuesday, 2 November, there was a new entrant in the comedy lists. Hancock’s Half Hour, written by the youthful pair Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, made its debut on the Light Programme at 9.30, immediately after John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and was facetiously billed in the Radio Times as ‘the first of a series of programmes based on the life of the lad ’imself from the files of the Police Gazette’. Those appearing, in addition to the 30-year-old Tony Hancock, were the future stalwarts Sidney James and Bill Kerr, Moira Lister (in the unenviable role of Hancock’s girlfriend), Gerald Campion (television’s Billy Bunter) – and Kenneth Williams. ‘BBC 10 a.m. Camden Theatre,’ he noted the previous Saturday. ‘Recording of “Hancock Half-Hour” went very well really, and I got through OK.’ This opening episode was called ‘The First Night Party’, with Hancock hosting a reception for BBC chiefs and newspaper critics. ‘It is easy to imagine the comic po
tentialities of this idea,’ claimed the Radio Times in advance, while afterwards Trewin described how ‘the expansively ecstatic ’Ancock presided, with intermittently contagious good spirits, over a new comic medley (“Higgins!” he cried to the Park Lane butler, “Cut another sturgeon!”)’.
Inevitably it would take a while for the fully formed Hancock persona to emerge (first on radio, later on television also), but once it did it was unique, perhaps best distilled by Roger Wilmut:
Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock II, of 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam; dressed in a Homburg hat and a heavy overcoat with an astrakhan collar of uncertain age; a failed Shakespearean actor with pretensions to a knighthood and no bookings; age – late 30s but claims to be younger; success with women – nil; financial success – nil; a pretentious, gullible, bombastic, occasionally kindly, superstitious, avaricious, petulant, over-imaginative, semi-educated, gourmandising, incompetent, cunning, obstinate, self-opinionated, impolite, pompous, lecherous, lonely and likeable fall-guy.
Hancock was undoubtedly the comedian of the 1950s, acutely mirroring many of the prevailing aspirations and frustrations, above all social and sexual. Hancock’s Half-Hour was also a pioneering type of radio comedy. ‘Non-domestic with no jokes and no funny voices, just relying on caricature and situation humour,’ was Galton and Simpson’s firm intention from the start, and though they were initially thwarted precisely by (among other things) Kenneth Williams’s funny voices, increasingly there was, as Peter Goddard has put it, ‘a naturalism of language, characterisation and location allowing for almost-believable story lines and audience identification’.7
Radio’s nemesis was implacably gaining ground – 163,872 new television licences were issued during October, a monthly record, taking the total up to some 3.8 million – but Gladys Langford continued to resist. ‘I still dislike TV,’ she reflected after watching the arrival of the Emperor of Abyssinia on a fellow-resident’s set at her north London hotel. ‘The figures are so tiny. I thought the Queen looked very drab, the Duke of Edinburgh slouches and the Duke of Gloucester was wearing spectacles. Winston Churchill looks a very, very old man.’ There were three especially notable new series. Fabian of the Yard was a Scotland Yard drama series filmed in documentary style and based on a real-life detective; Zoo Quest, produced and presented by a very fresh-faced David Attenborough, had not only film of an expedition to West Africa but also, in the studio, some of the animals brought back to London Zoo; and Ask Pickles was self-explanatory. ‘As soon as I saw that lean face, perfectly creased by years of practice into the right, warm smile, leaning into my parlour to say “ ’Ow do,” ’ wrote a relieved James Thomas in the News Chronicle, ‘I thought: “Doan’t thee wurry, lad, tha’s picked thisen another winner.” ’ Thomas did identify a possible problem of intrusiveness, but overall applauded Pickles because he ‘risks putting before the biggest audience in Europe an unrehearsed string of ordinary folk who make you wonder what they are going to say next’. Bernard Hollowood disagreed, laying into the blessed Wilfred in his regular Punch column on television. He accused Pickles of wallowing ‘smugly in a nauseating glue-pot of mawkishness’ and making ‘a public parade of emotion that is essentially private’, as he ‘unites long-separated lovers, friends and relatives, parades the afflicted, champions the hopeless ambitions of the untalented’. In short, declared Hollowood, he ‘persuades millions of viewers to become Peeping Toms, eavesdroppers, keyhole snoopers’.8
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