Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  It did not yet feel like boom time in Bethnal Green. There for a week in March, at the request of Peter Townsend, a dozen old people (as they were categorised then) kept a daily diary. A trio of entries for Monday the 21st gives the flavour of a family-centred world where the new affluence was still just a distant rumour:

  Mrs Tucker, 16 Bantam Street, aged 60, living with infirm husband in terraced cottage.

  7.45 am. I got up, went down, and put my kettle on the gas – half-way – then I raked my fire out and laid it, swept my ashes up, and then cleaned my hearth. Then I set light to my fire, then sat down for a while, then I made tea and me and Dad had a cup.

  9.20 am. I went out for the Daily Mirror and fags for Dad. About eight people said ‘Good morning’ with a nice smile, then I replied back. Then I went home and prepared oats and bread, butter and tea and me and Dad sat for breakfast. When we finished I cleared away and swept and mopped my kitchen out.

  11.15 am. I started to get dinner on, then Mrs Rice, a neighbour, asked me to get her coals in, and she will take my bag-wash, also get my dog’s meat. We had a nice chat about Mothers’ Day. I showed her my flowers and card which Alice sent. It was very touching, a box of chocs from John, stockings and card from Rose, card and 5s from Bill, as I know they all think dearly of me.

  1 pm. My daughter Alice came with baby. We had dinner together.

  2 pm. My daughter Rose and husband came. I made them a cup of tea and cake.

  3.15 pm. Dad and I sat to listen to radio.

  5 pm. We both had tea, bread and cheese Dad, bread and jam myself. When finished I cleared away again.

  7 pm. My son John and his wife called to see if we were all right before they went home from work.

  8 pm. I did a little mending.

  10 pm. We went to bed.

  Mr William James, aged seventy-three, widower, living alone in two-room flat on first floor in Gretland Street. Formerly a market porter.

  7.45 am. Got up, made a cup of tea.

  8 am. Started to clear the place up. Cleared the fireplace out. I had the sweep coming between 9.30 and 10 and they are very strict on time. And at 9 had some bread and marmalade for quickness and he came at 9.45. He stayed about 20 minutes – another 5s gone. Well, I had to sweep up and clear the place up and got out at 11.15.

  11.15 am. Went to the paper shop, got my News Chronicle and my ration of twenty Woodbines and went to my daughter’s place in Thirsk Street at 11.45. Sat down for a while and had a smoke.

  12.15 pm. Washed her breakfast things up, swept the kitchen up and then had another sit down talking to Mr Bird (budgie). Then found some cold meat, so I boiled some potatoes and had some dinner with a nice cup of tea.

  1.30 pm. Sat down and read the paper and listened to the wireless and of course dozed off till 3 pm. Got up, washed up and got ready for the girl to come home at 4.20, made a cup of tea, then the grandchildren came home at 4.40 and you know what they are for talking and at 5.30 I went home, buying the paper as I go along. Got home at 5.50.

  5.50 pm. First thing light the fire, then lay the table, make the tea, boil an egg and finish up with marmalade. Then sat down and read the paper. Then got up, washed up, had a wash, sat down till 9. Then went to the club and had a chat and a game of cards till 11, then home and so to bed 11.30.

  Mrs Harker, 12 Peacock Street. Widowed, aged sixty-two, living alone.

  Got up at 8.30, lit the fire 9.0, then had breakfast, tea and toast. 9.20 my grandson brought my dinner in to cook. 9.45 cleaned my budgie out and settled her. 10.0 peeled the potatoes. 10.15 started my clearing up, made the bed and washed up. 11.0 put my dinner on to cook and then did a little washing. 12.30 had my dinner, bacon and potatoes, fed the dog. After sitting a while got up and washed up. 2.10 got myself ready to go and see an old neighbour. 2.30 went over to my neighbour. After sitting talking about the family, made a cup of tea and had a cake, after that we finished our conversation. 4.0 washed up. 4.30 left her to come home to catch my daughter’s club man [her daughter was an agent for a clothing club, collecting weekly payments for clothing and shoes] but he didn’t turn up, so at 5.0 got my tea and sat resting by the fire. Then I got up. 6.30 a friend came in to pay her club. We sat talking about the family, and in the meantime my grandson and his friend came in to take the dog for his night’s run. My friend left at 7.15. After that I cleared the fireplace up and tidied up the room. 7.30 sat down and had a read of the paper. 7.45 started to write a letter to my son in Dorset. 9.0 got my supper, a boiled egg and toast, and cleared away. After that I sat and had another read. 10.20 went to bed.

  ‘Balls to say as administrators do more neighbourliness & more services for elderly,’ Townsend himself jotted down not long afterwards. ‘Important thing is what is happening to family. Help family to help itself.’ Meanwhile, his colleagues Michael Young and Peter Willmott continued to work away at what would become Family and Kinship in East London (1957). ‘800 Bethnal Green families now lie massed on a big office table,’ Young noted in May after a big push on the interviews. ‘How shall we convert them back again into flesh and blood people? Social research is a strange job. Pouring information from one bottle into another, making people into words and always hoping for the creative leap which will make facts into life.’15

  Things were also tight at Woburn Abbey. Family seat of the dukes of Bedford, it was in a decrepit state when the 13th Duke inherited it in 1953, along with a crippling bill for death duties not far short of £6 million. After initial dismay, he went to work with a will and in April 1955 opened it to the paying public, complete with children’s zoo, playground, boating lake and tearoom. His wife Lydia helped out as a guide, and during the first week a man came up to her and, with the words ‘That’s for you, ducks’, put a sixpenny bit in her hand. More than 180,000 visitors came in the first year, well above expectations, and despite some murmurings of disapproval, a razzmatazz future lay ahead for the ancestral home. The Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri, visiting England about the same time as the opening, noted ‘the growing habit of visiting the country houses’ and, on the basis of personal observation, tried to explain why: ‘One motivation of a practical order must be ruled out altogether, and that is the wish to get ideas about building, furnishing, and living in such places. Even historical interest in them or the families did not seem to be very strong, because many of the visitors had to be supplied with such information. Those who went to see them appeared to derive some immediate and direct satisfaction from the mere sight of the houses and their contents.’ Even so, these were grim times. ‘In 1955 alone,’ according to the architectural historian J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘country houses were coming down at the rate of one every two-and-a-half days. There had been nothing quite like it since the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’ And this summer there was particular dismay when Lord Lansdowne demolished a large, Adams-built part of Bowood House in Wiltshire, on the grounds that it had gone beyond any possibility of economic repair and, even if repaired, would be uneconomic to maintain. ‘In France and Italy Bowood would be a classified monument,’ James Lees-Milne from Brooks’s fulminated to The Times. ‘The fate that now awaits it would not be tolerated in these two countries for a moment.’

  Henry St John, the misanthropic civil servant, continued the almost commentless chronicling of his life. ‘In Ealing the trolley-bus driver refused to move until some people who he stated to be standing upstairs were removed,’ he recorded on Saturday, 16 April. It was a situation that might have appealed to Tony Hancock, whose second radio series – hard on the heels of the first one finishing in February – was due to start the following week. Unfortunately, he had done a runner, booking himself in at a cheap pensione on the Neapolitan Riviera. The frantic producer turned to another comedian, who good-naturedly agreed to stand in, and on Tuesday evening it fell to Robin Boyle to announce, ‘This is the BBC Light Programme. We present Hancock’s Half Hour, starring – Harry Secombe . . .’ Soon afterwards, Hancock himself (or his agent) gave a quote to the Sunday P
ictorial: ‘I’m the kind that can’t relax. It doesn’t matter how many times I play a scene, I’m always trying to add something to it. It frays my nerves to a frazzle and suddenly my system won’t take it any more.’ Since the previous November he had been performing twice-nightly in The Talk of the Town, a revue at the Adelphi Theatre. Now, he eventually returned to the fray, but not before Secombe had deputised twice more. The rest of the series, however, proved a triumph, as (in one biographer’s words) ‘public enthusiasm built quickly’ and 1955 turned into the year ‘in which the country became truly conscious of the Hancock phenomenon’.

  Radio, not television, was still the universal medium, with figures in June showing that whereas some 40 per cent of middle-class households had a TV set (still quite an expensive item), only 26 per cent of working-class households did. Class, though, was not the sole determinant, for whereas 41 per cent of families with a child aged between eight and fifteen had a set, the same was true for only 26 per cent of families without such a child. Or in the nicely understated explanation of Mark Abrams, in his analysis of ‘Child Audiences for Television’, there existed ‘a widening appreciation among parents that television can take from their shoulders the burden of keeping their children silent in the hours between returning from school and going to bed’. Abrams in April 1955 systematically investigated the viewing habits of children (eight to fifteen) and revealed as never before the medium’s addictive qualities: ‘As far as the majority of children are concerned, the tea-time viewing [ie of programmes specially for children] is at best a mere warming-up, a preliminary flexing of the eye muscles, before the main diet starts at 7.30 pm [ie after the so-called toddler’s truce, with no programmes at all while parents got their small children to bed]; over 70 per cent of children in TV homes said they had watched at least part of the adult TV programmes on the evening before the interview.’ Moreover, ‘middle-class parents who own TV sets are only a little more restrictive than working-class parents with TV sets when it comes to letting their children stay up and watch adult programmes’. All in all, ‘the average child in a TV home spent 1½ hours every evening watching adult television’, with half of those in the 11-to-13 range still being in front of their sets after 9.00 p.m. And unsurprisingly, when children were asked to name their favourite programmes, only 34 per cent of their votes went to children’s programmes, with far more plumping for Ask Pickles (a particular favourite of working-class children), The Grove Family and Fabian of the Yard.16

  This spring the annual outcomes to the football season had a more than usual resonance, in retrospect at least. Newcastle United won the FA Cup for the third time in five seasons; Chelsea won their first league championship, overcoming an early 5–6 home defeat to Manchester United; Luton Town, watched by increasingly prosperous Vauxhall car workers, gained promotion to the First (ie top) Division; and the supporters of Accrington Stanley went through the emotional mill, faithfully recorded by the Accrington Observer. Only one team would be promoted from Third Division North, and Stanley started the Easter programme four points clear of Barnsley at the top (only two points then for a win). After a battling draw at York City on Good Friday (‘a grand slam set-to with plenty of good football, thrills and he-man stuff’), humiliation came next day, 9 April, as in bright sunshine and in front of a crowd of 11,250, they crashed 5–2 at home to Hartlepool, with Stanley ‘more and more disorganised and ragged, until, by the final whistle, the rout was complete’. By the 23rd, after more indifferent results, it was a case of ‘something of a miracle needed’, but over the next week things suddenly swung back Stanley’s way, so that by the 30th, the last Saturday of the league season, ‘hope will, indeed, be very much alive’ if Stanley could win at Chesterfield. Sadly, they slumped to a 6–2 defeat – ‘Oh dear, oh dear, what an anti-climax!’ – and the same afternoon Barnsley wrapped up promotion. Still, a 3–0 win at Bradford City the following Wednesday secured second place. ‘At any rate,’ optimistically reflected ‘Jason’ of the local paper, ‘Stanley are now “on the map” and a team and club to command respect.’

  For almost four weeks this spring, sporting and other deeds went largely unreported in the national press. As the result of a dispute involving the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Communist-dominated Electrical Trades Union, a national newspaper strike began on 25 March, affecting almost all London-published daily and Sunday titles. Harold Macmillan’s diary recorded some early developments:

  27 March. There have been no papers obtainable for two days except the Manchester Guardian and the Yorkshire Post. No Sunday papers – an immense relief! . . .

  31 March. Today, I am told, the whole London consignment of the Yorkshire Post was stolen at Kings X, by some ingenious speculator, for re-sale at an enhanced price . . .

  1 April. The newspaper proprietors are losing heavily. Those which have a great range of papers, periodicals etc (like Amalgamated Press etc) are sound enough. The Daily Chronicle [ie News Chronicle] is said to be rocky. And the Daily Herald too. So perhaps the only tangible result of the strike may be to silence the Socialist and Radical press! . . .

  Eventually, after the inevitable Monckton-appointed Court of Inquiry, there was a settlement, and the papers reappeared on 21 April. ‘For all the people who are connected with newspapers the strike has been a difficult period, a time they will long remember as one of anxiety, suspense and frustration,’ declared the pink paper that was starting to cover the British economy as a whole and not just the City. ‘For many papers, including the Financial Times, it was the first time in their history that they altogether failed to appear.’ At least one diarist was less fussed. ‘It is extraordinary,’ reflected Madge Martin in Oxford the same day, ‘how everyone got on quite well without them.’

  Had they? ‘Results show, in general, a picture of frustration (not always unhappy), a good deal of anti-strike feeling, a broad awareness that the strikers want wage increases and a vague knowledge of the pros and cons of the matter,’ Mass-Observation found during the strike on the basis of its familiar mix of interviews, observations and overheards. ‘People are adjusting themselves to the strike: some with irritation and signs of nervous strain as they search for anything at all to read; some with relief as, freed from apparent compulsion to read, they decide that the strike has compensations. For most, however, the loss of newspapers is a big loss . . .’ Of 500 carefully watched Londoners travelling to work by Tube on the first Monday in April, 59 per cent were sitting and doing nothing, while the same morning at Surbiton station at about 9.00, the usually very busy bookstall made only three sales in ten minutes. ‘A young clergyman bought Robin, a children’s paper; a young man bought Automobile; a middle-aged man bought the Christian Science Monitor after picking it up between thumb and finger and enquiring sarcastically “What is this?”.’ M-O also included some vox pop, mainly but not entirely negative:

  My husband gets very depressed. The paper’s a part of his life. I feel utterly lost. (Tailor’s wife)

  Not reading The Times is like not cleaning your teeth. (Middle-class man, retired)

  You know there’s something missing. It’s getting a bit tight to light the fires. You have to scrape round the boy’s scrapbooks and his comics. (Working-class housewife)

  I miss my bit of scandal in the Sunday newspapers. (Young working-class shop assistant)

  It’s a nuisance to men, not so much to women, they don’t have time to read. (Wife of Post Office worker)

  Oh, I do miss the newspapers. For one thing I never know the date and then there is nothing to argue about on the bus going to work. (Wages clerk)

  I think it’s rather a nice change not to have newspapers, not to read about Atom bombs all the time. (Electrician)

  It saves me a bit of money – 2s 6d a week. (Trade representative)

  I think it’s a jolly good thing. It gives people a chance to read stuff that’s more valuable. (Local government official)

  Those – the majority – who said they had been personally
affected by the strike were asked to identify what in the papers they had missed in particular. Sport (including the pools) was easily top on 35 per cent, followed by the news (20 per cent), crosswords (7 per cent) and cartoons (4 per cent). Among that last small but dedicated group, feelings seem to have run especially high. ‘There is a rumour that they are printing papers for themselves in Fleet Street,’ a female reader of the News Chronicle said. ‘Does that mean that when the papers start again we shan’t know what has happened to Colonel Pewter for a fortnight?’

  One visitor, staying at London’s Connaught Hotel, felt only modified rapture at the return of the fourth estate. ‘Would you please have someone tell the Daily Sketch that not only would I not do a piece of writing for them but that I wouldn’t use their rotten rag even to stuff up a rat hole,’ Raymond Chandler requested his British publisher on 27 April. ‘Our press is no bargain, but your gutter press is fantastically bad.’17

  6

  A Lot of Hooey

  People were also asked during the newspaper strike what stories they would like to have read about. ‘Oh, bits about accidents and murders and thrilling bits, you know,’ replied a 29-year-old cleaner in a cafeteria. ‘Any boxing news or football. The Don Cockell fight . . .’ answered a 51-year-old mechanic. ‘I think only the small news items, nothing special, just the little bits,’ said the 24-year-old wife of a transport driver. It was left to a 54-year-old builder’s labourer to stake the high ground: ‘Well, I missed the splash they would have made about Churchill and now there’s the general election, still we won’t have to read a lot of hooey, will we?’

  The interviews were probably on about 18 April, only three days before the papers in fact returned, but thirteen days after the announcement that Churchill was at last stepping down. ‘Tears rolled down my cheeks,’ wrote Nella Last after hearing the news on the radio. ‘It’s been an honour to have had him for a leader, though if I’d been able to have “given him a wish,” it would be that tonight he went to bed, happy but sad, & in his sleep started his last journey & never woke as the King he served so well did.’ Next day, Wednesday the 6th, Sir Anthony Eden became Prime Minister, an event treated by the still toothless BBC as a pre-ordained coronation virtually above politics. The handsome, charming, highly strung Eden had, like many crown princes, waited a long time – too long – for this moment. ‘It is a pretty tough assignment to follow the greatest Englishman of history, but I feel sure Eden will make a good job of it,’ Harold Macmillan optimistically reflected that day, but the greatest Englishman himself had on the eve of his departure – after entertaining the Queen to dinner at No. 10 – declared with a sudden vehemence to his principal private secretary: ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’