Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  The following week, on Friday the 15th, Nella Last heard on the six o’clock news that Eden would be making a radio broadcast at 7.30. But before then, her next-door neighbour, Mrs Atkinson, dropped by:

  She said, ‘What can Eden have so important to say? Do you think it’s about Princess Margaret marrying Townsend?’ She is so very interested in every scrap of news of them. I said, ‘I shouldn’t think it would be a Prime Minister’s job to tell us.’ My husband said, ‘More likely he’s got the newspaper strike settled.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t think he has anything to do with that either.’ My husband said, ‘What can it be then?’ Without a thought in my head it could be a solution, I said, ‘Only thing I can think is a sudden decision to have an Election.’ They both were doubtful.

  Nella was right, with Eden setting the election date for some six weeks hence, 26 May. This was barely three and a half years since the last election, and the Tories still had an eminently workable majority, but quite apart from the natural wish to secure a personal mandate, Eden had another reason for going early. ‘Anthony has thought for a year now that we will run into trouble with our trade,’ his wife, Clarissa, had noted in her diary in February. ‘Anthony wonders if a snap election immediately after taking over may not be the best chance. He feels sure we will lose if we wait till the autumn.’1

  Four days after the date had been set, Rab Butler presented what could not but be seen as a highly political budget, cutting the standard rate of income tax by 6d and freeing 2.4 million people from paying the tax altogether, while at the same time publicly pinning his faith on ‘the resources of a flexible monetary policy’ in order to counterbalance this fiscal generosity. The Financial Times, once back in action, argued that Butler had been ‘right to take his risks on the side of expansion’, though did concede not only that the budget had been inflationary, but also that ‘the condition of the economy still needs to be watched with great care’. Gaitskell as Shadow Chancellor bitterly accused Butler of placing political popularity above economic prudence, but it was the Manchester Guardian that called the larger game correctly: ‘Mr Butler may indeed have cause to regret his generosity later in the year . . . And then the laugh would really be with Mr Gaitskell. But the prospect of Mr Butler “eating his words” at some time in the autumn is not going to win this election.’2

  Almost certainly a third reason for Eden’s timing was the desire to exploit the recent, particularly intense bout of rancorous discord within the Labour Party. As usual, Bevan and his arch-foe Gaitskell were in the thick of things, and the issue was the H-bomb, which the government had announced in February that Britain would be making. Bevan did not – unlike some Bevanites – oppose that as such, but in a direct assault on Attlee’s cautious, deliberately ambiguous line, he insisted that it was Labour’s job to pressurise the government into abandoning its suicidal policy of ‘first use’ and reorientating its whole foreign policy. ‘We have now reached a situation,’ he told the Commons in early March, ‘where Great Britain can, in a few short years, run the risk of extinction of its civilisation, and we cannot reach the potential enemy [ie Russia] in an attempt to arrive at an accommodation with him because we are now at the mercy of the United States.’ More than 60 Labour MPs then rebelled with him against the official party line, and it was not long before Attlee was having to resist a concerted attempt by Gaitskell, who hugely exaggerated the organisational size and coherence of ‘Bevanism’, to get Bevan expelled from the party. ‘There are extraordinary parallels between Nye and Adolf Hitler,’ Gaitskell told an incredulous Crossman on the 22nd. ‘They are demagogues of exactly the same sort.’ A week later, Bevan apologised to Attlee, and once again, as in 1951, an implausible façade of unity was just about created for the widely expected imminent election.

  Importantly, ‘the Bomb’ itself as an issue had only limited traction outside the Westminster village. There was as yet no hint of a meaningful protest movement, and although 51 clergy and ministers did sign a petition urging the British people to ‘reject the monstrous and cynical policy which the Government has imposed upon them’, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, still had his bishops firmly in line behind him. Soon after the government’s February announcement, Crossman discussed the matter first with the Daily Mirror’s political editor Sydney Jacobson, and then with a former Labour minister, Arthur Creech Jones. Jacobson told him that after his paper had devoted two successive front pages to the H-bomb, arguing that Britain had to have one, they had received a grand total of only ten letters on the subject, while Creech Jones frankly observed about the underlying attitude of most people: ‘They’re not interested because they always assumed we’d got it already and that, even if we hadn’t, we were bound to make it in a world as crazy as this.’ So too during the general election in May, when the octogenarian Bertrand Russell, speaking on a Labour platform, tried to energise the electorate over the proposition that amid the dangers of chemical, bacteriological and nuclear warfare, ‘the only alternative to living together is dying together’. On the day, according to Alistair Cooke’s humorously ironic report in the Manchester Guardian, Russell got a decent round of applause, but the overall response was a collective shrug of the shoulders.3

  If not the H-bomb, what were the voters thinking and talking about? During the campaign, Picture Post featured some electoral vox pop:

  Government? This Government or any other – I haven’t got much time for ’em. To tell the truth I never voted last time. Whenever we put in for a rise we get the same answer – whoever’s in. My basic rate’s £6 11s 6d. With two young kiddies it’s not enough, I’m not jokin’. This five and ninepence a week we have to pay the Government – a waste o’ money, I call it! The Conservatives put their foot in it there all right. (Charlie Quentin, roadsweeper, Liverpool, voting Labour)

  The whole of the Socialist programme tends to restrict trade rather than to expand it. Britain is a trading nation. We must stand well financially and economically in the eyes of the rest of the world. (Charles Purnell, stockbroker, London, voting Conservative)

  I never did vote Conservative and never shall. I’ll never forget what happened a few years after the First War. They knocked our money down from forty-eight shillings to thirty-two shillings in one week. I think it was a Conservative Government – Conservatives were in it, anyway. (Tom Mason, herdsman, Eggington, Beds, voting Labour)

  I dislike intensely the term ‘working class’. We are all working people and I think the Tories legislate for all of them. Labour seems to think that if you wear a collar and tie you are the dregs. (Mrs Jones, doctor’s wife, Liverpool, voting Conservative)

  We’re worse off than we were under the last lot. The rent’s gone up 1s 6d a week, but we’re not grumbling about that. No, it’s the prices of things. Coal is scandalous – 6s 5d a hundredweight. Labour are more for the working people. If they got in we’d all be better off. (Mrs Woolfrey, housewife, Liverpool, voting Labour)

  I think this lot have not done badly, not bad at all. The country’s certainly a lot more prosperous now. We old age pensioners are 7s 6d better off. Though the rent has gone up threepence, and food costs a bob or two a week more than it did, I still think I’m a bit better off. No, I don’t think that Labour will improve things that way. Course, they’re all for the trade unions, and they’re the people who keep our wages up. (H. Hogden, newspaper seller, Manchester, voting Labour)

  I used not to be interested in politics, but I became a Conservative. Actually, I’m more anti-Socialist than pro-anything. I’m not all that politically minded – I don’t think much about the H-Bomb – but the principle of free enterprise is right up my street. (Dick Brittain, haulage contractor, South Benfleet, voting Conservative)

  On this job it’s all work and a bit of bed. I’ve got to earn a decent wage as the wife and I are buying our own house, with a nice little greenhouse, too. The basic wage is only £6 16s a week, and I’ve got to put in about 25 hours’ overtime to get a wage worth picking up. The wor
k’s rough, dirty and wet, and ruins your clothes. Still, I don’t think any of this is the Government’s fault. It was no better when Labour were in. If Sir Anthony Eden can’t sort things out, I don’t think anybody can do it. (John Wells, haulage worker, Carnforth, voting Conservative)

  The magazine’s Kenneth Allsop also spoke to a hundred out of the two million first-time voters (twenty-one still the minimum voting age). ‘What emerged very strongly – even amongst those who declared themselves for Conservative or Labour – was a dislike, almost amounting to rebelliousness, against domination by the two major parties,’ he reported. ‘One after another, they expressed abhorrence at the highly-organised and disciplinarian structure of the House of Commons. “Just two huge voting machines,” “a three-line whip system,” “they’re as different as chalk and chalk” – these were some of the phrases used. It may be out of this discontent with the present two-party game of pitch-and-toss that a Liberal revival is grown.’ Allsop concluded that ‘Young Britain is in a militant mood for more individuality, for less conformity and political rigidity’, but if so one of his interviewees, a barrow-boy called Ron Gibbs, had not heard. ‘ “Me? I’m voting Conservative, mate,” ’ ran the caption underneath a photo of him. ‘ “Should think so, too,” said his uncle, owner of the stall. “We don’t want them Labour stranglers back.” ’4

  It was not an election that ever really caught fire. ‘Electioneering seems to be leaving people cold,’ noted Gladys Langford on 11 May, with just over a fortnight to go. ‘The newspapers report that at a meeting at which Douglas Jay was to speak only 7 people turned up and one of these represented the Press so the meeting was cancelled.’ When, right at the death, Attlee went to speak at Sittingbourne football ground, in Britain’s most marginal constituency, the attendance was described by the Faversham Times as one that would have been poor for a match. The broadcasting figures told a similar story. An average of 15 per cent of the adult population listened to party political broadcasts on the radio, while on television the average was 14 per cent. Even assuming no overlap of audience, the combined total of 29 per cent was significantly below the 36 per cent average for radio broadcasts in 1951 (when there were no television broadcasts). No doubt the shortfall of interest was partly a reflection of the seeming inevitability of the outcome, with the opinion polls for all three weeks of the campaign proper consistently giving the Tories a lead of 3 to 4 per cent. At one point Nella Last’s husband did have a flutter of anxiety about a Labour win, but she calmly predicted to him an overall majority for the Tories of around 45 to 50.5

  Television coverage of the election was confined to party political broadcasts (all done live), so relatively speaking they mattered more than they would in later elections. Labour on the whole fared indifferently. ‘A nice, gentle person, the kind of neighbour from whom one can borrow a lawn mower, but a bit tedious,’ was how the habitually taciturn Attlee came across to the Manchester Guardian reviewer as, in the company of Mrs Attlee and sitting on a cretonne-covered easy chair by a rustic brick fireplace, he was interviewed by a supportive journalist. ‘One imagines that he neither won nor lost a single vote.’ Soon afterwards it was the turn of Harold Wilson and the formidable Dr Edith Summerskill (the party chairman) to pretend to be a married couple in order to demonstrate the sharp rise in the cost of living under the Tories – a performance significantly impaired by Summerskill sticking the butter price label into the cheese and vice-versa, while the butter and cheese themselves respectively melted and dribbled under the hot studio lights. Wilson just about managed to keep his composure, calling the notion that Labour would bring back rationing ‘a deliberate Tory lie’, and was praised by the New Statesman’s television critic, William Salter, as ‘forthright, unsmiling, the grim efficient executive’. By contrast, in a question-and-answer session a few days later involving a quartet of Labour figures, James Callaghan was condemned by Salter as ‘altogether too brash and cock-sure’, with the broadcast generally getting ‘completely out of hand’, including far too much ‘bonhomie’, for Salter ‘only bearable on panel games’.

  The Tory broadcasts also had some mixed fortunes – the appearance and style of Macmillan, thought Salter, was ‘guaranteed to re-establish in voters’ minds the stereotype of the Tories as an upper-class party’ – but overall were appreciably more professional in approach. Their last one was a virtuoso solo performance by Eden, speaking direct to camera and making benign references to ‘our Socialist friends’. Salter called it ‘a superb achievement . . . impressive and persuasive’, while according to Panter-Downes, ‘though the language was hardly Churchillian, the faithful clichés, plus an easy manner that is apparently a television natural, seemed to have hit the spot – the slow, sensible norm of the British, who detected their sincerity and liked it’. A faux-intimacy perhaps, but the public had never before been so close-up to the Prime Minister of the day.6

  Outside the studio, Labour’s campaign was, by common consent, poorly co-ordinated and uninspiring, with little fresh to say. ‘A rehash of an indigestible dish,’ was one commentator’s retrospective verdict on the manifesto, with Attlee in particular inevitably very much seen as yesterday’s man. ‘Wake up this election!’ he vainly implored one audience. ‘The Tories hope to keep it quiet and to sneak back into power before the nation realises what has happened.’ For their part, the Tories relentlessly emphasised the domestic economic aspect – rising standard of living, housing records smashed, increasing ownership of televisions, cars, washing machines and suchlike – while at the same time claiming that Labour’s return would inexorably lead to an austerity reprise of (as the Tory manifesto put it) ‘shortages and queues, ration-books and black markets, snoopers and spivs’. Still mindful of lingering memories of the 1930s, they were also careful not to frighten the horses. Take Enoch Powell in Wolverhampton, where in his election address there was, in a biographer’s words, ‘not a hint of his misgivings about certain aspects of welfare spending as he emphasised (in bold print) not only that NHS spending had increased and extra school places had been provided, but also that “retirement and other pensions, insurance benefits, family allowances, have been increased by 50 per cent or more” ’.

  The Tories also had in Eden a genuine electoral asset. ‘He said nothing memorable, but said it very well,’ observed David Butler, and it was the second half of that verdict that mattered especially. Eden himself, in a tribute to the efficiency of his party machinery, later claimed to have found the whole exercise ‘less exacting than rowing number seven in the boat’. Two episodes in his campaign had a particular resonance. ‘The car came to a halt in a strange district and we were surrounded by men staring curiously at us,’ remembered his wife, Clarissa. ‘I asked where we were and was told “the Gorbals.” I had a frisson of apprehension – then they recognised the person in the car and, smiling, they banged on the bonnet and the windows. Extraordinary. They were all going to vote Labour, but they supported Anthony.’ The other episode was at a naval base, where Eden was taunted about endangering the sons of other men. This was too much for him, and he spoke emotionally of his own son, a wartime pilot who had gone missing over Burma. ‘Frightfully good stuff, sir, you should do it more often,’ said his young personal assistant, Peter Tapsell (a future Tory MP). But Eden, as Tapsell recalled long afterwards, felt only shame at his loss of self-control.7

  Two of the more interesting candidates were standing for Essex seats. One was John Arlott. ‘I was the world’s worst canvasser,’ he shuddered afterwards about his three weeks in Epping. ‘I went to two houses only. The first one, I asked the lady who came to the door if she felt she could support the Liberals in the election. “What election?” she said: and the second one I asked the same question, and she slammed the door in my face.’ One evening he went looking for votes at the Royal Auxiliary Air Force officers’ mess at North Weald and found himself drawn into a costly game of liar dice at the bar, with a young Norman Tebbit among those playing.

  The other ca
ndidate was the 24-year-old Shirley Catlin (the future Shirley Williams), standing for Labour at Harwich. ‘I enjoy the campaign very much,’ she told the local paper, ‘but sometimes when I’m in a hostile neighbourhood speaking in the van, and never get a friendly wave, I feel after about ten minutes I could give up politics altogether. But you just have to carry on.’ The paper itself praised her as ‘a mistress of the apt phrase’ and gave an example: ‘ “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she announced on a cold, grey morning in Brightlingsea. “It’s a windy day, isn’t it? Vote Labour and temper the wind to the shorn lamb.” ’ The Harwich & Dovercourt Standard was, like most local papers, far from Labour-supporting, but after it was all over felt moved to observe that ‘there is no doubt that N.E. Essex has a soft spot for “Shirley” ’.

  At her nomination meeting, Catlin had hard words to say about the Tories: ‘Out of the 600 candidates they are putting up, no less than 80 went to Eton and 80 per cent went to public schools. They are still a party of a small class.’ She might also have mentioned that ten members of Eden’s eighteen-strong cabinet were Old Etonians, with five of those ten, including Eden himself, having then gone on to Christ Church, Oxford. ‘Gravy for Etonians: thin gruel and skilly otherwise,’ subsequently noted the colourful, proto-Thatcherite Tory MP Gerald Nabarro (educated at a London County Council school), adding that ‘the rest of the Eden Cabinet, with the exception of the Mancunian Lord Woolton, were almost as well born’. Nevertheless, if there was an emblematic Tory candidate in this election, it was not one of the silver-spooned, but Barnet’s candidate, the solidly upper-middle-class, but far from upper-class, Reginald Maudling. Still in his 30s, he had just been made Minister of Supply, prompting the Spectator’s gifted new political commentator, Henry Fairlie, to call him ‘the first dimpled child of Butskellism’, in tribute to his consciously moderate, progressive brand of Conservatism. During the campaign he spoke widely in other constituencies, but was also conscious of potential danger in Barnet itself, which now included the LCC out-county estate of Borehamwood – politically an unknown quantity. ‘We have done the things we have said we would do,’ he proclaimed at a meeting in Cockfosters the Saturday before polling day. ‘At home, taxes have been cut, controls lifted and more houses than ever built. The charge of being warmongers was made against the Tories, but we have ended the wars we inherited. It was said that there would be a million unemployed under a Conservative administration. In fact, employment is at a record level.’8 Maudling, one of life’s optimists, trusted it would be enough.