On the whole the advertisements are better than the programmes. They are lively and amusing – eg Westclox on the day when clocks had to be put back. All the family chuckle over Murray Mints. (44, housewife)
I think it is one of the most awful betrayals of codes of free speech and decent behaviour. (Single woman, 57, part-time social investigator)17
‘I have several times suggested that what I call the “Establishment” in this country is today more powerful than ever before,’ Henry Fairlie wrote in the Spectator on 23 September, the day after commercial television’s debut:
By the ‘Establishment’ I do not mean only the centres of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognised that it is exercised socially. Anyone who has at any point been close to the exercise of power will know what I mean when I say that the ‘Establishment’ can be seen at work in the activities of, not only the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the chairman of the Arts Council, the Director-General of the BBC, and even the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter.
Reactions were predictable. Bonham Carter herself dismissed the idea of an Establishment as ‘a fiction’, Randolph Churchill (Winston’s son) accused Fairlie of having ‘idiotic bees’ in his bonnet, and John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, implausibly asserted, on the basis of having sat on selection boards for the Foreign Service (according to Fairlie, a male bastion where what mattered was knowing the right people), that ‘candidates from grammar schools, and from working or middle-class homes, have (to say the least) as good a chance of success as others’. Fairlie’s article made a considerable impact and was the first significant post-war attempt to unpick the connections, and penetrate the secrecy, of what was still at the top a very closed elite – or what an exasperated William Cobbett a century and a half earlier had called ‘The Thing’. Fairlie might also have mentioned the Treasury, which on the home front was still a top-drawer institution of great prestige as well as mystique. In 1954 an American political scientist, Samuel Beer, submitted to officials the draft of his book about the Treasury, following several years of diligent, ingenious research, and encountered a nervous, even hostile reaction. The matter passed across the desk of the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, who reflected that ‘the real problem is whether we can allow the publication of a book which gets so near the knuckle in describing, evidently on the basis of some inside knowledge, how the Treasury works on the inside’. An essentially secretive, mandarin culture ran very deep, and the eventual upshot was that Beer was able to publish in 1956 only after having made extensive, emasculating revisions. One reviewer, the well-connected economist Roy Harrod, took away from Beer’s study the ‘comforting confidence’ that, whatever else ailed Britain, ‘this country remains supreme in the world in one field – top-level administration’.
In September 1955, ‘Establishment’ was not the only term becoming part of the general vocabulary. The current issue of Encounter included a typically witty piece by the novelist Nancy Mitford entitled ‘The English Aristocracy’, with most attention focusing on the passages in which she quoted from the philological work of Alan Ross, a professor at Birmingham University seeking to distinguish between upper-class and non-upper-class English usage, or what he called ‘U’ and ‘non-U’:
Cycle is non-U against U bike.
Dinner: U-speakers eat luncheon in the middle of the day and dinner in the evening. Non-U-speakers (also U-children and U-dogs) have their dinner in the middle of the day.
Greens is non-U for U vegetables.
Home: non-U – ‘they have a lovely home’; U – ‘they’ve a very nice house.’
Ill: ‘I was ill on the boat’ is non-U against U sick.
Mental: non-U for U mad.
Note paper: non-U for U writing paper.
Toilet paper: non-U for U lavatory paper.
Wealthy: non-U for U rich.
To these I would add:
Sweet: non-U for U pudding.
Dentures: non-U for U false teeth. This, and glasses for spectacles, almost amount to non-U indicators.
Wire: non-U for U telegram.
Phone: a non-U indicator.
(One must add that the issue is sometimes confused by U-speakers using non-U indicators as a joke. Thus Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love speaks of his dentures.)
The magazine had printed extra copies in advance, but still sold out in days. Or, as Mitford’s friend Evelyn Waugh wrote to her in Paris soon afterwards, ‘In England class distinctions have always roused higher feeling than national honour: they have always been the subject of feverish but very private debate. So, when you brought them into the open, of course everyone talked, of course the columnists quoted you and corrected you. Letters poured in to the various editors, many of them, I am told, unprintably violent.’18
Alan Dyer was definitely non-U among the miners at Manvers Main Colliery, Yorkshire. There, on the Silkstone seam, an unofficial strike in October proved shockingly divisive. Seven miners refused to come out, eventually leading, after the strike’s collapse, to a mock trial at which five of the seven confessed their regret for having worked on, one ‘sick’ was excused, and the seventh man, the 27-year-old Dyer, failed to turn up and instead went to the pit, where a Sunday shift earned him £4 overtime for filling 13 tons of coal. Accordingly, in a move that provoked national attention and much criticism, doing considerable damage to the trade-union movement as a whole, he was ‘sent to Coventry’ by his fellow-miners, who refused to work within sight of him. Eventually, the colliery manager weakly agreed to send him away from the pit to dig manholes half a mile from his nearest neighbour. ‘Why should I say sorry?’ an unrepentant Dyer asked the press. ‘I’ve done nowt wrong.’ With no help from the National Union of Mineworkers, but fortified by his mother-in-law’s declaration that ‘he’s a reet good worker is Alan’, Dyer indignantly refuted malicious rumours that he had worked through the strike only because he was in debt. ‘Look at them, all stamped up,’ he said as he showed journalists the hire-purchase cards on which he had bought his furniture. ‘I don’t owe anybody a penny. The television set’s paid for, too, and we’ve had it over two years. I’ve not done bad since I’ve been married, ’ave I? We reckon to put a fair bit by each week. We’re having a baby car in the spring. Though I put another idea into t’wife’s head last night – fourteen days on the Italian Riviera. £32 all in. Mind you, it’ll cost about eighty pounds for the three of us. Must take the kid [his three-year-old daughter]. That’s who the holiday’s for.’ Coming hard on the heels of several other well-publicised victimisation cases – including one in which an ostracised engineering worker in Warrington had gassed himself – it showed ‘the great labour movement’, in Picture Post’s words, ‘taking on all the dignity of a lynching mob’.
‘A fine semi-documentary film with Michael Redgrave acting splendidly,’ noted Madge Martin in Oxford on 18 October after going with her husband to see The Dam Busters. It was already five months since the royal premiere (Princess Margaret present), but only six weeks since the film had gone on general release. The Dam Busters was not every critic’s all-time favourite – the young Alan Brien rated it in the Evening Standard as only ‘a near miss’ – but elsewhere there was almost uniform praise: ‘One of the best war pictures yet made’ (Daily Mail); ‘The finest war picture’ (News Chronicle); ‘Excuse me while I rave’ (Daily Mirror). There was special praise for the film’s restraint, with Richard Mallett observing in Punch that ‘almost the only attempt at an emotional effect comes with the death of a favourite dog’, but seeing no need to mention that the dog’s name was Nigger. The Dam Busters proved an irresistible success – in commercial terms, definitely the British film of the year, arguably of th
e decade – and much of its appeal was down to a skilful script by R. C. Sheriff and ‘The Dam Busters March’ by Eric Coates, soon a hit record. Redgrave played Dr Barnes Wallis (creator of the bouncing bombs that breached the Ruhr dams), Richard Todd was Wing Commander Guy Gibson, in charge of 617 Squadron, and there were parts elsewhere in his crack team for Nigel Stock, Robert Shaw and Bill Kerr. It was not a film that even for a nanosecond questioned the existing class structure, with a strong showing in 617 for Oxbridge blues, while to convey the theme of imperial unity there was also a sprinkling of Australasians. ‘Hardly a Welsh or a Scottish accent to be heard,’ observes John Ramsden in his acute study of the film, ‘nor indeed one from the East End, the West Midlands or the North.’
The Dam Busters was of course only one example of the genre. At least 29 war films had already been released earlier in the 1950s, including The Wooden Horse (1950) and The Cruel Sea (a huge box-office success in 1953, starring Jack Hawkins), while immediately ahead would be at least 17 others in the next two years, including Kenneth More as Douglas Bader in the big 1956 hit, Reach for the Sky. For the most part with only minor variations, the formula was tried and trusted: plenty of action and plenty of insouciant, stiff-upper-lipped British heroism in a noble cause. Nor was it just films, given the ubiquity of ‘The War’, possibly even more in children’s lives and imaginations than their parents’. ‘As a child all the games I played were war games,’ recalled Richard Eyre (born 1943). ‘I fired sticks and mimicked the high stutter of machine guns in the woods, and flattened the long grass as I dive-bombed my friends with ear-damaging howls and flung my small body into the arc of heroic death. Or I sat in the cockpit of a large paratroop glider, whose still intact but inert carcass lay in an orchard at my friend’s house, wearing a gas mask as a pilot’s helmet and taking turns to sit in the pilot’s seat and steer the flak-torn fuselage through heavy bombardment towards its target.’ Or take Airfix Spitfires: sold by Woolworths for 2s, they proved to be, after their introduction in 1955, the toy firm’s most popular model, prompting Robin Blake to remember half a century later how he had ‘spent many a short-trousered hour, half stoned on glue, clumsily cementing together the moulded plastic sections’. Among boys’ comics, the issue of the Rover for 29 October 1955 was pretty typical. ‘3 FULL PAGES OF WAR PICTURES’ promised the front cover, while stories included ‘The Battle Against the Flying Bomb’ (‘Braddock, Ace Pilot of the Last War, is in Action against this Deadly German Weapon’), ‘Sergeant Allen of the Fighting 15th’ (‘The sky over Holland is dark with aircraft as the British Airborne Division drop in on Arnhem to write a glorious page in their history!’), and ‘The Eyes that Never Closed’ (‘How the Allies sought out and destroyed the German Submarines’), beside all of which the football story, ‘It’s Teamwork that Counts’, rather paled into insignificance.19
On 19 October, the day after the Martins went to The Dam Busters, Anthony Heap made one of his regular trips to the theatre:
At last catch up with the much discussed ‘Waiting for Godot’ which was produced at the Arts to a very mixed press early in August, and, on the strength of a surprising last minute rush on the Arts box office, unexpectedly transferred to the Criterion some six weeks later. The more exalted half of the critical fraternity deemed it a subtle, witty, sublime and moving masterpiece; the more low-brow reviewers, a meaningless morass of words, a conglomeration of tripe, a glorification of the gutless. Well, as I suspected, the latter were dead right. This obscure, verbose, unintelligible, and utterly infantile brainchild of James Joyce’s secretary Samuel Beckett, concerning the wearisome waiting of a couple of dreary decayed tramps for a never-appearing Godot is, in fact, as pretentious and preposterous a piece of highbrow-poppycock as ever I’ve had the misfortune to see.
Altogether, concluded Heap, it was ‘a crashing, exasperating bore’. Others agreed. John Gielgud ‘loathed’ it, Somerset Maugham called it ‘two dirty old men picking their toenails’, and the character actor Robert Morley, after brooding in his bath for an hour, came to the conclusion that ‘the success of Waiting for Godot means the end of the theatre as we know it’. According to Terence Rattigan, indisputably the leading British dramatist of the day, ‘all Mr Beckett has done is to produce one of these things that thirty years ago we used to call Experimental Theatre – a movement which led absolutely nowhere’.
But even amid the catcalls, inside the Criterion as well as outside, the fact was that Godot was playing to packed houses every night – so much so that when John Fowles tried to see it nine days after Heap, on the grounds that ‘everyone goes, so we must’, he found there were ‘no seats for three weeks’. In early November there was a stormy meeting of BBC Radio’s drama department on the subject of experimental productions. ‘Heaven defend us from an outbreak of Godot-scripts where the tricks only just hide an almost complete lack of anything to say,’ was the uncompromising view of the old guard, headed by Val Gielgud, brother of John. But the argument was won by Barbara Bray, a leading young script editor: ‘Third Programme planners will have to be prepared not only to be daring initially, but also to persist in the face of possible audience resistance long enough for public taste to accommodate itself.’ Not long afterwards, the Evening Standard drama awards were held for the first time, with feelings running high among the judging panel. After the conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent had threatened to resign if Godot was given the prize for best play, an ingenious compromise was brokered: best play to go to Jean Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates, while the prize for Godot was ‘most controversial’ play of the year – a one-off award, never given again.20
October was not a happy month for Rab Butler. His give-away budget in April – directly leading to the Tory election win in May – had been predicated on the Bank of England exercising monetary control over the banks, but by July a mixture of inflationary and balance-of-payments pressures had made it all too clear that the strategy, for all its immediate political pay-off, had been economically flawed. Butler in late July had announced a round of credit-restricting measures, but during October severe pressure on sterling led to him having to introduce an emergency budget on Wednesday the 26th, involving significant cuts in government spending and an increase in purchase taxes. ‘These were steeply raised on everything from a car to a lipstick, and clamped for the first time on lots of hitherto free household goods, which the Tories gloomily fear will hardly induce the housewife to love the Conservative Party,’ noted Mollie Panter-Downes next day. ‘Labour currently has its best chance in months for an all-out attack on the Government, and will certainly take it.’ This particularly applied to Hugh Gaitskell, who delivered in the Commons an uncharacteristically personal, bruising attack on Butler:
He has persistently and wilfully misled the public about the economic situation and he has done it for electoral reasons . . . The April Budget – a masterpiece of deception – certainly encouraged instead of damping down additional spending. Now, having bought his votes with a bribe, the Chancellor is forced – as he knew he would be – to dishonour the cheque . . . He has behaved in a manner unworthy of his office. He began in folly, he continued in deceit, and he has ended in reaction.
The speech, reflected the Observer’s political diarist, marked the ‘Demise of Mr Butskell’.
As British economic policy prepared to enter the stop-go cycle that would continue for at least the next quarter of a century, there were other signs, this time from the right, that that cosy, consensual, mythical figure was now past the high tide of his influence. At the Conservative Party Conference at Bournemouth earlier in the month, a chorus of louder-than-usual grumbles was heard from constituency representatives about the impact of rising prices on the lifestyles of the middle classes – some of whom, according to the man from Peckham, were ‘rapidly arriving at the position’ where they ‘can hardly afford even a theatre ticket’. Or take the speech some six weeks earlier by J. Gibson Jarvie, chairman of United Dominions Trust and a well-known City personality, at his company
’s annual meeting. After a disparaging analysis of the British workforce – ‘in many factories the most unpopular man is the hardest worker and the fastest’ – he turned to the government and directly blamed it for inflation: ‘It is their incredible weakness in dealing with organised labour and their demands for goods and services, their calls on the capital market and the inflated national income resulting from unproductive Government employment, which tear our economy to pieces.’ Nor, in terms of government, was it just the politicians: ‘Beginning with the war years, there has been a sinister abdication of power and authority to the established civil servants. Whitehall is the bureaucrat’s paradise. The creation and perpetuation of employment for civil servants seems to have been a prime objective.’ Finally, after a swipe at modern youth – ‘ambition sadly lacking . . . undisciplined . . .’ – Jarvie called for lower government spending, for lower taxation, and for ‘the strike weapon’ to ‘give way to a more sensible – I could say a more grown-up – method of settling industrial disputes’.
Delivered in the same year that the newly created, incorrigibly pro-market Institute of Economic Affairs brought out its first publication – on the desirability of the free convertibility of sterling – it was not quite a Thatcherite agenda, but not too far off.21
Butler’s budget, Waiting for Godot, even The Dam Busters – all mattered infinitely less to the British public this October than the unfolding Princess Margaret drama. The final phase of this act had begun on 19 August, two days before her twenty-fifth birthday. ‘COME ON MARGARET!’ screamed the front page of the Daily Mirror, adding, underneath a large photograph of her, ‘please make up your mind!’ The matter to resolve was whether, two years having elapsed since their enforced separation, she would now seek to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend – and what the price of such a marriage would be. ‘She has not absolutely decided,’ Harold Macmillan noted a week later after a conversation with Eden, who in turn had been talking with the Queen. ‘It will be a thousand pities if she does go on with this marriage to a divorced man and not a very suitable match in any case. It cannot aid and may injure the prestige of the Royal Family.’
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 62