Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Is it possible for a white man, and a coloured, to be friends? – One hastens to say ‘Yes’; but then, remembering the distant look that sometimes comes into the opaque brown eyes – that moment when they suddenly depart irrevocably within themselves far off towards a hidden, alien, secretive, quite untouchable horizon – one must ultimately, however reluctantly, answer, ‘No.’

  The next month, London Transport started to recruit staff from Barbados (and subsequently Trinidad and Jamaica), lending the money for their sea fares and arranging accommodation on their arrival. It was soon axiomatic that the capital would grind to a halt without this imported labour, doing work that the white working class was unwilling to do.

  North Oxford’s Cutteslowe Walls – erected in the 1930s, 7 feet tall, with a set of revolving iron spikes running the entire length – were not quite as notorious a symbol of continuing social divisions as the Gentlemen versus Players fixture at Lord’s, but in early 1956 a sociologist, Peter Collison, surveyed the pleasant, trim, almost entirely middle-class private estate on one side of the Walls and the almost entirely working-class council estate (the Cutteslowe Estate) on the other side. In answer to the question ‘Should the Walls Be Taken Down?’, 88 per cent on the council side said they should, in comparison with only 29 per cent on the private side, though 58 per cent there did concede that ‘a passage through them for pedestrians should be provided’ – not unreasonably, given that on the council side convenience of access to the bus stops on Banbury Road was overwhelmingly the main reason for wanting the Walls down. What motivated the private side? The key considerations, according to what residents told Collison, were (in descending order) traffic, social class and property value. He quoted some respondents:

  The Walls should never have been there in the first place, but as they have been up for twenty years, and many people on the estate bought their houses on the assumption that there would never be any through traffic, I think that they should stay up.

  If the Walls are taken down traffic will be diverted and cause child casualties.

  After all we are private owners and pay a lot more money, especially with increased rates. And there is a lot of riff-raff on the other side.

  At present children on the other side of the Wall fight those from this side. If the Walls were taken down the fighting would be much worse and as a mother I feel strongly about this.

  An undertaking was given that the council estate houses should not be built near the private estate and when the Walls are taken down the value of the property will drop.

  A lot of folk have bought their property here and I think it [ie removal of the Walls] might devalue it.

  On the council side, quite apart from the significant daily inconvenience, there was clear, understandable resentment. ‘People over there are no better than we are,’ said one. And another: ‘People on the private estate would become less toffee-nosed if the walls were removed.’5 But for the moment, they stayed put.

  Anthony Eden this winter probably felt he had more working-class than middle-class supporters. Just before Christmas, as Harold Macmillan replaced the economically discredited Rab Butler at the Treasury, Mollie Panter-Downes reckoned that ‘this looks like a moment of some gravity for the Conservative Party’ and identified ‘continuing high prices’ as a principal cause of its popularity being ‘at a low ebb’. Then on 3 January came the hammer blow of the Daily Telegraph – solid, reassuring organ of the middling classes, the paper they could trust – turning savagely on Eden and demanding, in what became a famous phrase, ‘the smack of firm government’. Soon the middle-class chorus of complaint was becoming incessant. ‘Wanted: An English Poujade?’ was the stirring headline given by Picture Post in late January to a letter from Miss M. Edwards of Holywell, Cheshire, detailing the latest price and purchase-tax rises; ‘. . . am very worried at the way prices are soaring’, lamented Florence Turtle in Wimbledon Park on 1 February; and later that month, a more occasional diarist, Rose Uttin in Wembley, wrote her first entry since 1949 in order to grumble that ‘food is so dear it might as well be rationed’, not helped of course by ‘3 weeks of awful weather below freezing every day’.

  The same month, a package of anti-inflationary emergency measures (including higher interest rates, tightened hire purchase and reduced subsidies on bread and milk) predictably brought no early increase in the government’s popularity, while on the 27th a strong editorial in The Times on the plight of the middle class – over-taxed and struggling, especially if on fixed incomes, against the ravages of inflation – prompted a flurry of unburdening letters. Typical was John Lewis of Cradley Rectory, near Malvern, claiming forlornly that ‘we creep through each quarter only with extreme care’ and calling for ‘credit facilities for educational purposes’ in order to avoid middle-class children being ‘squeezed out of the public schools by financial considerations’. Eden himself had already been castigated by Malcolm Muggeridge in the New Statesman as ‘Boring for England’, but it was politically much more damaging when the Spectator in early April ran a full-length attack on ‘The Lost Leader’, whose ‘irremediable faults appear to be an exceptional lack of vision or originality and an excess of vanity’. Later in April came the formation of The Middle Class Alliance, with Henry Price, Tory MP for Lewisham, as founder-chairman. Claiming more than 25,000 members already, and setting out a litany of grievances about the high cost of living and increased taxation, Price told The Times that it was ‘not a purely selfish, sectional movement’, but instead wanted ‘to preserve the middle classes for the service of the nation’.6 The suburbanites were at last getting restless – having been largely taken for granted ever since Lord Salisbury’s tactically brilliant creation of so-called ‘Villa Toryism’ in the late nineteenth century.

  The new leader of the Labour Party was indisputably middle-class, though of the upper variety. Attlee’s retirement had long been expected, and when he stepped down in December 1955 there was a three-way choice for Labour MPs, with the 49-year-old Hugh Gaitskell in the event trouncing Aneurin Bevan and Herbert Morrison, in effect a generational step-change. ‘It would have been better had they chosen Nye Bevan,’ complained Harold Nicolson, but a more typical reaction was Henry Fairlie’s in the Spectator, assessing Gaitskell as ‘emotionally and intellectually equipped for the highest political office’. One of his most loyal followers was Roy Jenkins, who in the 1970s, recalling Gaitskell, accepted that ‘he was stubborn, rash and could, in a paradoxical way, become too emotionally committed to an over-rational position which, once he had thought it through, he believed must be the final answer’. Jenkins also conceded that Gaitskell was ‘only a moderately good judge of people’, before going on:

  Yet when these faults are put in the scales and weighed against his qualities they shrivel away. He had purpose and direction, courage and humanity. He was a man for raising the sights of politics. He clashed on great issues. He avoided the petty bitterness of personal jealousy. He could raise banners which men and women were proud to follow and he never perverted his leadership ability. He was informed by sense and humour and by a desire to change the world, not for his own satisfaction but in order that people might more enjoy living in it. He was rarely obsessed, either by politics or himself. He was that very rare phenomenon – a great politician who was also an unusually agreeable man.

  But what about Gaitskell’s relationship with the electorate? In an editorial the day after his elevation to the leadership, The Times reflected that a major challenge ahead was to ‘prove his sympathy with people (with their aspirations and their individuality) as well as he has done, sincerely, with the people’s cause’.

  His replacement as Shadow Chancellor was Harold Wilson, who during the autumn had produced a substantial report on the weaknesses in Labour’s political machine – a machine that meant that ‘compared with our opponents’, he bluntly stated, ‘we are still at the penny-farthing stage in a jet-propelled era’. The report, asserted the New Statesman at the time, made Wilson �
�for the first time, a figure of real political importance’, and the magazine speculated that in him Labour ‘may have found the manager it has needed so long – young, vigorous, modern-minded and able to see that a party machine must be an inspiration to party workers and not merely the means of disciplining them’. In January, some three weeks after the change of leadership, Gaitskell recorded George Brown bitterly telling him that ‘he found it very hard to stomach Harold Wilson, and much preferred Nye’, to which Gaitskell reassuringly countered that ‘although he [ie Wilson] was a cold fish I thought he knew the need for loyalty’ and ‘was not really dangerous because he would not have much support if he made trouble’. Wilson himself at this time was on a visit to the Soviet Union, on his return telling the Daily Mirror that rapid scientific and technological advance there, together with effective centralised planning, had now convinced him that ‘in the next generation Russia’s industrial challenge may well dominate the world economic scene’. It was the start, his biographer Ben Pimlott noted, of ‘his “modernization” approach to economic policy, with its emphasis on planning and controls’.7

  It was likewise with the economic challenge from the Soviet Union specifically in mind that Eden, also in January, gave a speech at Bradford asserting that ‘the prizes’ would in future go to those countries ‘with the best systems of education’ and pledging that educational resources would be made available to ensure that the demand for ‘many more scientists, engineers and technicians’ was met. There followed in February a White Paper entitled Technical Education that, under the auspices of Sir David Eccles as Minister of Education, outlined a new structure of Colleges of Advanced Technology (CATs) to exist alongside the universities, with, below them, an extensive tier of regional colleges, as well as detailing Russia’s lead over the West in the output of engineers and technicians. Yet even if these ambitious plans were to be implemented, there remained a major shortfall at secondary level because of the ‘Cinderella’ status of technical schools, of which by the late 1950s there were only 267 in England and Wales, compared to 1,252 grammar schools and 5,493 secondary moderns.

  More generally, ‘declinism’ seems – despite the recent advances in material prosperity – to have been well under way by 1955–6. ‘Do you remember the post-war joke about the Germans’ new secret weapon – hard work?’ asked Fyfe Robertson in August 1955 in a typically spirited letter to Picture Post warning about the dangers of inflation. ‘We thought it a good crack then. But it’s not so funny now. The Germans are steadily taking over our markets. They’ve rebuilt their cities, re-equipped their industries, and achieved a remarkable degree of prosperity in a remarkably short time – with scarcely any rise in prices.’ And Robertson wondered whether the difference between the two countries was ‘simply that too many British people are not giving a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage’. Three months later the magazine published an inquiry into why the British shipbuilding industry – still the biggest in the world – was starting to lose out to German shipyards, while about the same time an ambitious, gifted young football writer, Brian Glanville, brought out a book, Soccer Nemesis, about the decline of British football. The following February the financial journalist Harold Wincott visited industrialists in the Midlands, where he found them deeply conscious of ‘the Germans and the Japanese breathing down your neck the whole time’. Another concerned observer was Aidan Crawley, who soon after leaving ITN in early 1956 made for BBC television a documentary series called The Edge of Success about British industry and whether it was using new methods and competing with its European rivals. He was particularly struck, he recalled, by the arthritic state of the declining industries and their lack of responsiveness to fresh challenges. When for instance he asked General Sir Brian Robertson whether the lack of time-keeping equipment accounted for the notorious unpunctuality of British Railways, Robertson accused Crawley of ‘bowling him a fast one’. As for the shipbuilding industry, ‘almost all shipbuilders refused to take part in any programme’, though they eventually permitted the filming of ‘the welding of steel plates on to the deck of a ship’, which because of demarcation problems proved an ‘interminable’ process.

  Crawley’s series neatly dovetailed with another BBC television series, presented by Christopher Mayhew, about the whole question of Britain’s ‘decline’. Ahead of it, the BBC in the winter of 1955–6 commissioned a survey of 416 adults, of whom 46 per cent reckoned Britain had declined as a world power over the previous half-century, compared to 17 per cent who thought Britain was now more powerful. In terms specifically of Britain’s ranking among the world’s economies, 28 per cent saw decline (mainly blaming the trade unions) and only 10 per cent saw improvement, with the rest unwilling to venture an opinion. There was also a ‘Way of Life’ question: here, 39 per cent perceived decline, 23 per cent improvement, with the declinists citing as evidence:

  day-to-day cases of selfishness; attitude of trade unionists to their leaders; the attitudes of children and teenagers; the size of cinema crowds; monopolies in industry; the retaining of emergency powers by Government; use of troops to break strikes; length of military service; the fact that ‘anything different is frowned on’; the way that people ‘expect things to be done for them’; overcrowding; traffic chaos.

  As for causes of this deteriorating way of life, the most frequently given were ‘“too much welfare and state care” (which makes people “do less for themselves”); the quantity of mass entertainment readily available; American films and comics; insufficient discipline and training of youth; growth of state controls and red tape’.

  Still, amid all this pessimism, one future worldbeater took to the streets on 8 February. Defying the cold snap, RM 1 – London’s first Routemaster bus – left Cricklewood Garage that Wednesday morning to ply route 2 (Golders Green–Crystal Palace). Sadly for the history-making passengers, the heating system obstinately refused to work.8

  On Saturday, 24 March there was the usual huge crowd for the Grand National at Aintree, with Lancashire’s Chief Constable, Eric St Johnston, having to make sure that the royal party (including the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret) did not run into the Russian party (including the former Premier Georgy Malenkov and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, guests of the Central Electricity Authority). The Queen Mother, in her usual ice blue, had a particular interest, with her horse Devon Loch, ridden by Dick Francis, being strongly backed at 100/7. The Manchester Guardian described the race’s sensational denouement:

  Devon Loch was five lengths clear of ESB, with Francis already stretching out a hand for his bay leaves. Then the astonishing happened. Devon Loch’s hind legs buckled and he went down on his stomach. In what can have been no more than two seconds but it seemed like an age, Francis threw his weight forward and his mount struggled to his feet. Could he still do it? It looked as though he might. The first royal victory in the National since 1900 – only 40 yards away. But down went the hind legs again as ESB rushed past. Francis dismounted, threw down his whip and wept when he heard the applause for his effort.

  Over the years there would be many theories why Devon Loch collapsed – a reaction to the huge, excited, cheering noise around him, trying to jump an imaginary fence, cramp, even a Soviet conspiracy. As to the royal response, Harold Nicolson was given the inside dope a few days later when at luncheon he sat between the Queen’s Private Secretary and the young Duke of Devonshire. ‘The Queen Mother never turned a hair,’ he recorded afterwards. ‘“I must go down,” she said, “and comfort those poor people.” So down she went, dried the jockey’s tears, patted Peter Cazalet [the trainer] on the shoulder and insisted on seeing the stable-lads who were also in tears. “I hope the Russians saw it,” said Devonshire. “It was the most perfect display of dignity that I have ever witnessed.”’9

  ‘The whole press (all over the world) is full of the accounts of Khrushchev’s speech (or speeches) attacking Stalin and his memory,’ noted Macmillan on 19 March, five days before the National. ‘He seems to h
ave accused him of almost every known crime. This amounts to the biggest “volte-face” since the Stalin-Ribbentrop pact in 1939.’ It was indeed a momentous development, with reports being leaked of Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech on 25 February at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, acknowledging and exposing something of the reality of Stalinism. Among British Communists, the focus inevitably was on the party’s Twenty-fourth Congress, to be held in Battersea Town Hall at the end of March. There, it proved too soon for any revisionism. ‘Comrade Stalin,’ declared the former Communist MP, Willie Gallacher, ‘was the steel sprung mattress around which the best comrades gathered,’ while the General Secretary, Harry Pollitt, insisted that ‘the Soviet Union is and remains the greatest Socialist power in the world’, where ‘exploitation of man by man has been abolished’.

  Such reactions engendered a profound sense of disenchantment on the part of two gifted, charismatic figures. ‘It is the biggest Confidence Trick in our Party’s history,’ Edward (E. P.) Thompson wrote from Halifax on 4 April to a fellow Communist historian, John Saville, in Hull. ‘Not one bloody concession as yet to our feelings and integrity; no apology to the rank-and-file, no self-criticism, no apology to the British people, no indication of the points of Marxist theory which now demand revaluation, no admission that our Party has undervalued intellectual and ideological work, no promise of a loosening of inner party democracy . . .’ The other figure was the Scottish miner (by now workman’s safety inspector) Lawrence Daly, secretary of the 1,200-strong Glencraig miners’ branch of the party and justly described by the Daily Worker the previous year as ‘a self-educated man of immense talents who speaks with fluency and knowledge’. On 29 April, he wrote to the party’s headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden, arguing that the British party had to dissolve itself and start again in order to be free to criticise the Soviet Union – a suggestion that in due course brought a stern response from John Gollan (who had just succeeded Pollitt), informing Daly that his proposal involved ‘a negation of everything you have tried to do since you joined us 16 years ago as a lad of 15’.10 For Thompson, for Daly, for many others, it was the start of a painful, ultimately liberating process, in which the ‘New Left’ was born.