Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  It was most wives, though, who truly knew what long hours meant. In the spring of 1951, a Mass-Observation survey involved 700 working-class housewives in Islington, Wandsworth, Camberwell, West Ham and Hendon for a week keeping daily diaries, which cumulatively revealed that their average weekday was one of at least fifteen hours, with at least half of those housewives spending between three and four hours daily in and around the kitchen. A typical day is exhausting simply to read:

  Forenoon Afternoon

  Got up; washed Started to cook lunch

  Cooked and ate breakfast Cleaned hall while lunch cooked

  Dressed baby Lunch

  Cleared breakfast Washed up lunch

  Tidied and swept nursery Ironing

  Made children’s beds Brought in washing

  Put baby out in pram Tidied self and baby

  Got dressed herself Fetched boy from school

  Made own bed; tidied bedroom Tea

  Tidied bathroom, cleaned basin, Wrote letter

  polished floor Went to post

  Cleaned out grate; tidied living room Cleared tea

  Tidied kitchen; washed up breakfast Bathed children and put them to bed

  Laundry; hung out washing Washed up tea

  Took out rubbish; brought in coal Cooked supper

  Went out to shop Supper

  More laundry Sat and knitted

  Read evening paper

  Went to bed

  ‘Much of her day,’ observed M-O about the housewife generally, ‘may be spent in total isolation from adults.’

  Three years later, Dr Irene Green, Medical Officer of Health for St Faith’s and Aylsham Rural District Council in Norfolk, contrasted in her annual report the shorter hours of the worker, holidays with pay and regular half-days, which had all ‘reduced the strain on large sections of the population’, with the conditions in which many housewives and mothers still worked. ‘The burden of the housewife with young children has been little affected by these changes,’ she went on, ‘and her hours of service to the family are still as long as ever they were. Everyone needs a day or even a few hours off occasionally and I am shocked to find some mothers never enjoy this luxury and no one seems to think they should.’ There had apparently been little change by the spring of 1956 when, exactly five years after its first survey, M-O again investigated ‘The Housewife’s Day’ and again found it was at least 15 hours long. Nevertheless, it did emerge that working-class housewives were now ‘spending rather less time on domestic jobs’, especially preparation of meals and housework, ‘and more on both part-time work and leisure’, including watching TV, than had been the case in 1951. Partly this was down to labour-saving devices, above all automatic washing machines, but their spread was still patchy and most homes were not yet temples of white electrical goods. ‘The job with the 100-hour week’ was how Picture Post in March 1956 profiled Anne Driver, a mother of four living in Hunstanton, married to a council worker, and busy through the day and into the night ‘cooking, cleaning, scrubbing, window-cleaning, house decorating, washing, ironing, first-aid, nursing, carrying coal, humping laundry, sewing, mending, patching, darning, cleaning sinks and drains, helping neighbours, caring for pets, and polishing’.44

  Did these homemakers resent their assigned role? There simply does not exist for these years the weight of contemporary evidence to enable a definitive answer, but the probability is that by and large they did not, or at the least, if they did resent it, then they were broadly resigned to it. ‘Restricted to the home as they are,’ Dennis et al explicitly stated in their Featherstone study, ‘wives do not actively resent it. When pressed they will acknowledge jealousy of their husband’s freedom, but many of them say that they find satisfaction in the care of their children.’ Oral testimony suggests a degree of positive enthusiasm. ‘I was mistress in my kitchen and that is how I liked it,’ recalled Pamela Woodland, who as a young teacher in Rotherham had married in 1953. ‘I did everything. I knew where everything was. My kitchen was like a very, very efficient workshop . . . It was my ambition to run the house to the best of my ability.’ Similarly, interviewing a range of women about their post-war experiences, the historian Claire Langhamer has found that they ‘rarely fail to express pleasure in at least some aspects of their domestic work’. She quotes the working-class ‘Jean’, who married in 1955: ‘I just enjoyed having it nice and putting your nice tea set out and that sort of thing, you know. It was all part of the pleasure . . . This home-making thing to me was nice, you know.’ Attitudes are never static, and the very fact of an increasing appetite among married women for part-time work was a harbinger of change on the way, but at this specific time – the early to mid-1950s – not only were traditional gender roles still largely set in stone, but the zeitgeist as a whole overwhelmingly enhanced and fortified the self-worth of the homemaker, a self-worth already fortified by the ingenuity and resourcefulness needed to survive the austerity era.

  Of course there must have been many moments of discontent, and lives of outright unhappiness, but they surface surprisingly rarely, even in the diaries. Nella Last, however, allowed herself one such moment in June 1954. ‘I did so hope to get him to see Danny Kaye [in Knock on Wood], but had to be content when he agreed to go on the Coast Rd,’ she recorded after a Friday outing with her husband. ‘I proposed tea at a very good little café, it would only have been 3/6 or 3/9 for the two, but he pointed out, “very little more, & it would be the price of a cwt of coal, & anyway, nothing could be nicer than our own bread, butter, jam & cake.” I thought peevishly “except making them always” . . .’45

  A rigid division of labour inevitably meant a high probability of husband and wife living most of the time in separate spheres. ‘The comedian who defined “home” as “the place where you fill the pools in on a Wednesday night” was something of a sociologist,’ noted Dennis et al in relation to Featherstone’s miners. ‘With the exception of a small minority, the husbands for preference come home for a meal after finishing work and as soon as they can feel clean and rested they look for the company of their mates, i.e. their friends of the same sex.’ So too in working-class Liverpool, where according to Mays ‘male solidarity is a conspicuous feature of social life’ and ‘men and women tend to segregate the social activities’. Significantly, when Gorer asked the married readers of the People to rank factors making for a happy marriage, ‘comradeship’ and ‘shared interests’ came well down, at sixth and eighth respectively, while in terms of factors making for an unhappy marriage, ‘each going own way’ was a lowly twelfth. The ideal, in other words, of a so-called ‘companionate marriage’, with an emphasis on teamwork, partnership and shared interests, was clearly not universally practised – and indeed, on the basis of her interviews in Preston, Lancaster and Barrow, Elizabeth Roberts bleakly concluded that it had been ‘difficult to find many companionate marriages in this study up to 1970’.

  Much turned on male attitudes to housework, and here the contemporary sources largely endorse Roberts’s assertion that ‘women continued to be chiefly responsible’, with ‘little evidence of a corresponding increase in the amount of work their menfolk did around the house’ to match the increasing amount of paid work that their wives did outside the home. In Gorer’s survey, ‘selfishness’ was easily the main fault that wives found in their husbands, though there were also dishonourable mentions for ‘taking wife for granted’, ‘lazy, sleepy, won’t help in house’ and ‘untidiness’. Soon afterwards, in a survey of married women working in the higher grades of the Civil Service, Margot Jefferys found that ‘1 in every 4 husbands either did not help at all or did so only inconsistently, and only 1 in 5 put in as much as half the hours spent by their wives on domestic tasks’; in 1954, Dr Green in Norfolk noted how ‘many husbands seem particularly selfish’ in the sense of ‘never offering to be child-minders to allow their wives a little relief from this duty’; while in a letter to Woman’s Own the following year on the question of whether a man could run a house as efficie
ntly as a woman, Mrs M. Titterington of Enfield waxed sarcastic: ‘Men manage the home on their own? Oh Yes! manage to dodge most real work. Methodical? Certainly. Their method is to get someone else to cope with the situation.’ Or, as Richard Hoggart observed in Hunslet, ‘. . . many wives come home from work just as tired as their husbands and “set to” to do all the housework without help from them’.46

  Nevertheless, things were starting to change, especially in the case of younger couples. ‘Some working-class husbands will share the washing up if their wives go out to work, or will take turns with the baby if their job releases them early and not too tired,’ noted Hoggart. Shaw similarly in her working-class London suburb recorded how a young wife had ‘volunteered the information that she and her husband could talk about everything and anything together, she thought that modern girls were not afraid of their husbands, as the older generation had been, and so they could be companions for each other and do things together’. As for the East End, Young and Willmott were pleasantly surprised by ‘the new sight of young fathers wheeling prams up Bethnal Green Road on a Saturday morning, taking their little daughters for a row on the lake or playing with their sons on the putting green’. Moreover, the drift outwards of many of these younger couples during the 1950s further encouraged a more companionate marriage. John Mogey in Oxford discovered that a strictly demarcated division of labour between husband and wife was over three times less common on the new Barton estate (off the ring road) than it was in the rundown St Ebbe’s district in the city centre. And in Debden, for all its shortcomings in terms of a wider sense of family and kinship, Young and Willmott observed marriages that were much more a ‘partnership’ than those in Bethnal Green, with the husbands often having given up beer or going to football matches and generally being much more focused, like the wives, on their shared home. Indeed, Elizabeth Bott in her 1957 study Family and Social Network argued that what decisively pushed couples towards a more companionate approach was the absence of extended family networks, in effect throwing husband and wife on themselves and their own resources.47 Given that the outward migration was set to continue, and similarly the decline of the extended family, the era of the companionate marriage was clearly – if still patchily – under way.

  Even if it was a partnership, it was not necessarily a partnership of equals. ‘She was a big heavy woman, on the short side, but broad and very strong, with a strength of mind even greater than the strength of her body,’ was how Adam Faith (born in 1940 as Terry Nelhams), recalling his Acton childhood, described his mother, whereas his coach-driver father, Alf, was ‘the kindest, most passive of men’, in charge of his life only when behind the wheel. Or when Frank Girling, an anthropologist, spent 18 months in the mid-1950s investigating life on a Scottish housing estate largely occupied by unskilled workers, he found that the women had ‘a dominant position in the social life of the area and also in their own homes’, regarding ‘all male activities with tolerant amusement’, and that the men ‘lack the self-confidence and assertiveness of their wives’.

  Overall, however, the evidence suggests that more often than not it was the husbands who called the shots, perhaps in part because by this time they tended to be several years older than their wives, which had been much less the case before the war. Mays in inner-city Liverpool, for instance, depicted a world in which girls were anxious to get engaged – and thereby raise their status – as soon as possible after leaving school, followed by marriages in which there was ‘an acceptance of a male-dominated home’, with ‘a great amount of deference paid to the husband as wage-earner and as the traditional head of the family’. Many husbands were tyrants. ‘My father would bellow, “GET YOUR ELBOWS OFF THE TABLE” at everyone, including my mother, whose apron had to be spotless at all times,’ recalls Janet Street-Porter about her father at meal times in working-class Fulham; another compelling memoir, Silvertown by Melanie McGrath, describes the unblinking brutality and exploitiveness of her grandfather Len Page, running the Cosy Café in the East End; Billie Whitelaw’s autobiography evokes a loveless marriage to an older actor, Peter Vaughan, increasingly irate as her star rose; and the bullying, hectoring Labour politician George Brown used his long-suffering wife Sophie as little more than a doormat who, in their daughter’s words, ‘just put up with hell, basically’. Sophie might have secretly sympathised with Florence Parsons. ‘I only did it to please him,’ she explained on 1 January 2000 (her 100th birthday, and 21 years after her husband’s death) about her long years of voting Labour. ‘When he’d gone, I changed to Tory.’ Just occasionally, in a world largely run by men for men, the worm could turn. In the spring of 1955, a Derby County club-house went not to Stewart Imlach and his wife, who had been promised it, but instead to a new signing. The manager, Jack Barker, showed the Imlachs an inferior house and tried to sweet-talk Mrs Imlach, whereupon she whacked him with her handbag. ‘I can’t believe I did that,’ she remarked half a century later – and the result, in a display of marital unity, was an immediate transfer request.48

  Two especially key areas in the husband/wife balance of power were money and birth control. From a range of evidence, it seems clear enough that most male wage-earners reserved part of their wage for personal spending purposes and then gave the rest to their wives for the housekeeping, often without revealing how much they had held back.49 ‘Unlike many of my friends,’ recalled the Scottish miner Lawrence Daly rather ruefully, ‘I showed my pay slip to my wife and discussed with her what was I thought a fair share for pocket money. My friends thought this proved that I was, as they said, a hen-pecked husband. My wife, on the other hand, saw no virtue in this whatsoever as it was what she had been brought up [in middle-class Worcestershire] to expect.’ What is also clear is that the division of the weekly wage packet was usually inequitable. In 1949 a Mass-Observation survey found that only 14 per cent of husbands spent less than 5s on themselves, compared to 52 per cent of wives; two years later an assessment of why many married women wanted paid work argued that a principal – perhaps the principal – reason was in order to avoid having to ask their husbands for the money ‘for a new dress or hat’; Michael Young in 1952 argued that housekeeping allowances had failed since 1939 to keep up with rising earnings; and soon afterwards, Dennis et al in Featherstone discovered that wives there had virtually no personal spending power. ‘They give out the housekeeping money as if it were a gift,’ a 54-year-old middle-class wife from Weston-super-Mare complained to Gorer, and others echoed her bitterness:

  Treat their wives as paid housekeepers. Not let his wife know how much money he has. (Wife, 30, Wigan)

  Meanness or rather hard over money matters. This refers to my husband. (Working-class wife, 49, Bury St Edmunds)

  Spending too much on cigarettes, betting and the ‘local’ when the wife needs it more for the home and the children. (Lower-middle-class wife, 29, Bromley)

  They do not understand high cost of living. They do not go shopping with their wives to find out where money goes to. (Wife, 30, Birmingham)

  Many men deliberately keep wives short of money on pretence of saving for old age, but nothing makes a woman age quicker than having to scrape and do without when children are young. (Middle-class woman, 56, Birmingham)

  As for birth control, the pioneering work of Kate Fisher has decisively overturned long-standing assumptions that it was women who cared more about this aspect of marriage and who determined the arrangements. Instead, on the basis of extensive oral histories in Blackburn, Hertfordshire, Oxford and south Wales, she has concluded that not only was ‘men’s knowledge of birth control more extensive than women’s’, but that ‘men were frequently given ultimate power to determine whether or not birth control would be used, what method was chosen, and the regularity with which it would be employed’. One of her interviews, with ‘Larry’ (a builder and foreman bricklayer) and his wife ‘Doreen’, has a particular piquancy. They had married in Blackburn in 1946 – he twenty-nine, she twenty-four – and they had had two so
ns:

  LARRY: We never discussed it.

  DOREEN: What?

  LARRY: This business of, er, family breeding.

  DOREEN: I asked you ‘Please could I have, try for another child?’ You know that. You kept saying ‘No, I don’t want a football team.’

  LARRY: I said I didn’t want a big family.

  DOREEN: Well, I didn’t get one. You said ‘We’re just right, we’ve a two-bedroomed house and we’ve two boys, it means moving, no.’ That’s what you said.

  LARRY: Well, I thought you were in the same mind.

  DOREEN: No, I wanted to try for a girl and you wouldn’t say yes.

  LARRY: Well, I thought it might’ve been a boy.

  DOREEN: Well, if it had’ve been, I’d’ve tried again for a girl.

  LARRY: Well, that’s why I’d’a – stop . . . that’s why I put a stop to it.

  DOREEN: Huh! Yeah, he’s the bo – . . . he was the boss.

  LARRY: Well, I was the boss then.

  Unsurprisingly, Larry had also not permitted Doreen to work: ‘I felt as though I could keep her.’50

  Sex itself was the subject of only one systematic survey during the 1950s – Eustace Chesser’s The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman (1956), based on questionnaires completed in 1954 by more than 6,000 female informants, located via GPs and with a middle-class bias. The married women were asked about their degree of ‘sexual satisfaction in sexual intercourse’, to which 43 per cent replied they had ‘a lot’, 36 per cent ‘a fair amount’, 16 per cent ‘a little’ and 5 per cent ‘none’. Three other suggestive findings emerged: the higher up the occupational ladder the husband was, the more sexual satisfaction his wife was likely to get (or at least claim to get); among wives not fully enjoying intercourse, the four most common reasons given were ‘husband ejaculates too quickly’, ‘husband does not pet enough before intercourse’, ‘too frequent intercourse’ and ‘husband expresses too little tenderness’; and overwhelmingly it was felt by wives that men wanted sex more frequently than women did. Over the years the methodology behind Chesser’s survey would be much criticised – Chesser himself, a doctor, wrote prodigiously on sexual matters – but it remains a key source.