Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  As it happened, Khrushchev, accompanied by the Russian Prime Minister Marshal Bulganin, was visiting Britain during April. It was a visit that made waves even in advance. ‘They’ve arranged that we should have them to tea,’ Prince Philip (visiting Coventry for the laying by the Queen of the new Cathedral’s foundation stone) told Richard Crossman on 23 March. ‘I don’t know what the hell we shall give them. I think it’s bloody silly. But they think we should give them too much importance if we had them to lunch.’ Three days later, at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Malcolm Muggeridge (who a quarter of a century earlier had exposed the huge human cost of Stalin’s collectivisation programme) told a protest meeting that ‘expecting B. and K. to reform their ways as a result of seeing our free way of life is liking asking two professional ladies from the Moulin Rouge to attend Roedean in the hope that they will marry Archdeacons and settle down to a life of quiet respectability’. During the visit itself, running for ten days from 18 April, ‘Bulge and Crush’, as they were nicknamed by the press, ‘somehow assumed’, noted James Cameron early on, ‘the character of an experienced double-act in a touring vaudeville’, and almost the only time they were embarrassed in a public context was when, attending the Oxford Union, banners like ‘Joe for Prof’ and ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ were held aloft by students, with ‘Poor Old Joe’ being sung ironically. The event was televised, and Florence Turtle recorded with glee how ‘the Russians did not know what was being sung & waved & cheered!’

  But shortly afterwards, on the 23rd, there was a more serious contretemps at the Commons dinner given to them by the Labour Party. ‘Khrushchev made a speech saying that it was Russia alone who defeated Germany,’ related Nicolson two days later, once again on the basis of inside knowledge:

  George Brown exclaimed, ‘May God forgive you!’ Khrushchev broke off and asked the interpreter what he had said. It was translated. Khrushchev then banged the table and said, ‘What I say is true!’ George Brown is not the mild type of Socialist. He replied, ‘We lost almost half a million men while you were Hitler’s allies!’ Silence pénible. At the Speaker’s luncheon yesterday George Brown went up with outstretched hand to apologise, but Khrushchev put his hand behind his back and said sharply, ‘Niet!’ My [Labour] friend told me that in a long experience of unsuccessful banquets, that will live in his memory as the most acid failure that he has ever witnessed. Apparently the Russians are furious at the undergraduates ragging them at Oxford . . .

  There were two other piquant aspects to Labour’s ill-fated dinner. ‘I will never forget his contemptuous attitude to us,’ Crossman recalled about Khrushchev’s aggressive, bullying speech, ‘his couldn’t-care-less suggestion that we should join the Russians because, if not, they would swat us off the face of the earth like a dirty old black beetle.’ The other aspect concerned Harold Wilson, who that evening probably met the 24-year-old Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender) for the first time. She was taking shorthand notes, on behalf of Labour’s general secretary, and afterwards Wilson drove her home. ‘Something of significance must have happened that night,’ subsequently reckoned Joe Haines (Wilson’s future press secretary), because ‘discussions recalling that evening always made Marcia jumpy, so much so that it became a standing joke among a few of us that if I wanted to induce a panic in her, I would simply send her a postcard with the numbers 23456 on it.’11

  Bulge and Crush were gone almost a week when on Thursday, 3 May, the Manchester-based Granada launched commercial television for 400,000 homes in Lancashire and Cheshire, with transmissions across the Pennines to follow in the autumn. ‘Good entertainment – with a sense of responsibility’, was the self-professed motto of its main man, Sidney Bernstein, determined to combine profitability and quality, in the advertisement breaks as well as the programmes themselves. ‘You can use Granada advertisements as a trustworthy guide to wise spending,’ viewers were reassured at the end of the first night. ‘Wise spending eventually saves money . . .’ At this point most Mancunians were probably looking ahead to Saturday afternoon and City’s chances in the Cup Final, still an entirely BBC preserve. In a compelling encounter, their German goalkeeper Bert Trautmann broke his neck a quarter of an hour from the end, but played on, as Manchester City overcame Birmingham City 3–1 – widely praised courage that was an important moment of Anglo-German reconciliation. Three days later, Tuesday the 8th, saw John Fowles and his wife-to-be Elizabeth fielding laborious questions from a private detective in order to facilitate her divorce (‘the profoundest things in life treated so naïf-mechanically’), Christopher Mayhew winding up his TV series about whether the British were in decline (‘about the only Socialist who does not infuriate me’, noted Turtle), and – the start of a theatrical revolution.

  ‘First Night of “Look Back In Anger” at the Royal Court,’ recorded the inevitable, invaluable Anthony Heap:

  The English Stage Company will surely have to find better new clothes than this excruciating first effort by a young actor named John Osborne if its repertory venture is not going to come a serious cropper. What we had inflicted on us tonight was, in fact, not so much a play as one long mortifyingly monotonous monologue by one of the most insidiously and insufferably boring characters it has ever been my misfortune to encounter as a playgoer – a too awfully bitter and so terribly cynical young neurotic with an outsize chip on his shoulder and a pathological hatred of everything and everybody. He begins ranting, railing and raving in the most pretentiously puerile manner as soon as the curtain goes up and, except to make himself equally objectionable by occasionally playing some hideous ‘blues’ on a trumpet off-stage, never – or hardly ever – lets up to the bitter end. There are, it is true, one or two other characters – the dreary little long-suffering pregnant wife who leaves him for a few months ere mournfully returning after a miscarriage, her tarty little actress friend who ‘fills in’ for her in the interim and the oafish numbskull who virtually lives with them in their squalid little one room attic flat. But as their only function is to serve as targets for the tiresome tirades of the futile, nauseating, self-pitying boor in question, they don’t help very much. Neither, for that matter, does the acting of Kenneth Haigh (the ‘unhappy mixed up Bid’), Alan Bates (the doltish Dobbin), Mary Ure (the woebegone wife) or Helena Hughes (the stand – or rather lay – in), their best though they doubtless do in the unfortunate circumstances.

  ‘Look Back in Anger, indeed!’ he concluded. ‘What else can one be expected to do after wasting a dollar and an evening on such wearisome rubbish.’12

  Some reviewers in the next few days agreed with Heap. ‘Its total gesture is altogether inadequate,’ reckoned The Times; ‘. . . the most putrid bosh’, declared the Evening News; ‘. . . self-pitying snivel’, asserted Milton Shulman in the Evening Standard. Even so, they were far from universally discouraging. The unashamedly middle-brow Cecil Wilson (Daily Mail) predicted that Osborne would write ‘a brilliant play’ once he had ‘let a little sunshine into his soul’, John Barber (Daily Express) conveyed a sense of excitement – ‘It is intense, angry, feverish, undisciplined . . . But it is young, young, young . . .’ – and Derek Granger (FT) identified it as ‘a play of extraordinary importance’ whose ‘influence should go far, far beyond such an eccentric and isolated one-man turn as the controversial “Waiting for Godot” ’.13 Above all, there was the verdict in the New Statesman of Cuthbert Worsley, who on the first night had only with difficulty prevented Terence Rattigan from following the example of the West End impresario Binkie Beaumont and walking out. Worsley found the play ‘a remarkable piece of writing’, called Jimmy Porter a ‘Wolverhampton Hamlet’, and declared that in his soliloquies ‘you can hear the authentic tone of the Nineteen-Fifties, desperate, savage, resentful, and, at times, very funny’. Still, Osborne and his backers were undeniably grateful when the two Sunday heavyweights entered the lists on his side. ‘A writer of outstanding promise,’ asserted Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times, while for Kenneth Tynan in the Observer th
e play was a wonderfully fresh, accurate, life-enhancing portrait of ‘post-war youth as it really is’ – ‘the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of “official” attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour (Jimmy describes a pansy friend as “a female Emily Brontë”), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned’. Tynan finished with a characteristic encomium: ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.’

  So too for Brian Thompson, a grammar-school boy who was now a Cambridge undergraduate. ‘Jimmy Porter spoke for our generation: both the anger in his voice and the self-pitying,’ he recalled half a century later about going to the first night with his girlfriend. It was a performance given an extra resonance for him by an incident just before the start:

  A burly man and his wife who could easily have been Alison’s parents [ie in the play] accused us of sitting in their seats. I showed him the stubs and he rolled his head like a maddened bear. He was drunk and so, to a lesser extent, was his wife.

  ‘Don’t make yourself ridiculous,’ she said, leaning over me. ‘Just hop off.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s us that looks ridiculous.’

  ‘Educated people might say, “It is we”,’ she corrected icily.

  We had the undivided attention of three rows by now.

  ‘We’re not shifting.’

  ‘All right, chum,’ the man said. ‘Okey-dokey. We’ll see, shall we?’

  The front of house manager was called and we showed the ticket stubs again.

  ‘Bloody man’s in our seats,’ the theatre-goer insisted. ‘Won’t budge, impudent little shit.’

  We were in his seats but his tickets were for the following evening’s performance. He stumbled away, cooed on by that peculiar English disdain that does not have to raise its voice. Then the curtain went up and little by little I saw what I should have said.14

  11

  No Choice

  ‘A bluebook full of whitewash’ was how ‘at first glance’ the report of the Guillebaud Committee – set up by Iain Macleod three years earlier to examine the cost-effectiveness of the NHS – struck The Times on its publication in January 1956. ‘It advises no major change in the structure or financing of the service, and sees no opportunity for a substantial saving on any part of it or for funding fresh income outside the Budget. It proposes no new charges on users of the service. Indeed, it suggests the eventual dropping of some charges and increased spending in some services.’ But the paper conceded that on closer inspection the committee had ‘argued their case with considerable thoroughness’, in particular demonstrating incontrovertibly that ‘the service’s share of national resources has dwindled steadily since 1949’. Such an outcome – effectively shooting the fox of the Treasury and the more right-wing Tories – owed much to the committee having turned for expert advice to a young, brilliant, idealistic Cambridge economist, Brian Abel-Smith, reputedly 27th in line for the throne and a committed Labour supporter ever since his hateful time at Haileybury. He proceeded to work closely with Richard Titmuss, joining him at the LSE in 1955, and together they provided the statistical ammunition that underpinned the report. Bevan’s baby, still only seven years old, was safe in its present form for the foreseeable future, though the Spectator was justifiably scornful of the committee’s decision ‘not’, in Guillebaud’s words, ‘to visit formally any hospitals or other establishments concerned with the working of the National Health Service’.

  There was no doubting the NHS’s broad-based popularity. When Gallup asked patients later in 1956 ‘how they felt about the service’, 90 per cent answered favourably and only 3 per cent unfavourably. Moreover, 87 per cent thought that their doctor was doing a ‘good’ job (and 9 per cent a ‘fair’ one), while 86 per cent found their doctor’s waiting room ‘satisfactory’. As for the prescription charge of 1s, some 64 per cent of patients accepted that as fair.1 Of course, the popularity of the NHS cut both ways. On the one hand, it made it politically unthinkable that any party would seek fundamentally to dismantle it; on the other, people’s sense of gratitude – however undemonstrative – for the relatively austere, no-frills NHS they had been given made it easier for governments to continue to run it on a tight fiscal rein. Put more harshly, the very fact that the NHS in the 1950s and for quite a long time thereafter was not on the political front line inevitably encouraged, on the part of this paternalistic monopoly provider, a certain degree of complacency and even mediocrity.

  Gallup’s question ‘Do you feel your doctor is also a friend in whom you can confide or not?’ scored a surprisingly high 79 per cent ‘Yes’, even though – or perhaps in part because – most GPs did not stray too far from the advice of Stephen Taylor, in his 1954 guide to Good General Practice, that ‘the better the clinician, the less often does he diagnose neurosis’. As for keeping the patient in the loop, Taylor quoted a GP interviewee: ‘I make it an absolute rule never, under any circumstances, to tell a patient what his blood pressure reading is. Instead I say “Not bad for your age”, or “Quite reasonably satisfactory”. Once a patient knows he or she has hypertension, symptoms multiply enormously, and misery grows . . .’ What if a patient was dissatisfied with his or her GP? Hard evidence is elusive, but Titmuss noted in 1957 that ‘among patients today’, following Ministry of Health restrictions imposed in 1950, ‘an impression has gained ground that it is impossible or almost impossible to change one’s doctor’.

  The patient was even more disempowered in hospitals – many of them grim, sometimes dilapidated, often Victorian buildings, with no new hospitals yet built since the war. Outpatient departments tended to be particularly dismal, time-wasting places, as typified by Richard Gordon’s ‘St Swithin’s’: ‘The queue shifted up the wooden seat as each patient was called inside by the stern-faced nurse at the door: the movement was slow and spasmodic, like the stirrings of a sleepy snake.’ Fyfe Robertson in 1954 highlighted the issue. ‘Too many patients feel that to too many outpatient doctors they are not people at all, but card numbers and diseases,’ he observed in the context of recent patient surveys. ‘Probably most criticism today concerns outpatient treatment.’ Labour’s research department did the previous year consider whether it might be possible to end the cattle-like system of block bookings, but concluded limply that although ‘it is desirable wherever possible that hospitals should endeavour to operate an appointment system’, the problem was ‘very difficult’.

  For inpatients, not only were there punishingly long hours (the ludicrously early wake-up still sacrosanct), but for child patients the great majority of hospitals did not allow daily visits, with some not allowing visits at all. David Widgery (a future radical East End GP) was a child in the 1950s and had lengthy stays in hospital:

  Among my memories of the kindness of the nurses and the other patients, the presence of doctors seemed occasional and special, arriving in troupes to discuss the progress of one part of your body while you, rather embarrassed, stared at the ceiling, tried not to cry and pretended not to be getting in the way. After they had safely left the ward, patients would confer about what was decided, most importantly whether there was any chance of discharge. The junior nurses would join in the guesswork. I grew to understand that the patient was usually wrong about everything, that once you got your bedpan you would probably be stranded, perched on it for an hour, that the patients had only the dignity, status and rights they could squeeze from the system, and we all remained in ignorance about our progress because it was nobody’s job to explain, except the houseman, who was half-asleep anyway. We were not people, we were a ‘tib and fib’, a ‘Charnley’, and ‘two fractured necks of femurs’.

  The ever-alert Titmuss reflected in 1957 how ‘autocratic behaviour among hospital staffs, with behind them a long tradition deriving from military discipline, didactic teaching and Poor Law regimenta
tion, is strengthened by the invasion of scientific techniques, by increasing specialization and by the growth of professional solidarities’ – and he warned against what he chillingly called ‘a danger of a new authoritarianism in medicine’.

  Did the British Medical Association (BMA) have anything to say about the treatment of patients? ‘Doctors’ pay was the subject at BMA House,’ recalled Paul Vaughan, who in 1955 got a job there in the public relations department. ‘It was generally assumed it was what the BMA were there for . . .’ Vaughan added that, when Bevan’s name came up, it was ‘usually pronounced Bev-Anne . . . usually with a sort of grimace’.2

  Almost half the NHS’s beds in the mid-1950s were occupied by the mentally ill, for the most part in large mental hospitals built on the pattern of jails, with the patients living in huge, often locked wards. In a poignant entry by a far from wholly sympathetic diarist, Anthony Heap in October 1955 describes visiting his wife, Marjorie, who for the past seven months had been at Friern (previously known as Colney Hatch) Mental Hospital:

  Grieved to find M not only transferred to another, grimmer, more remote ward on account of getting out of hand in the other one, but in a much worse condition, dopey and more deluded than ever. The insulin and electric shock treatment she’s been having only seem to have had a detrimental rather than a beneficial effect on her, and I can’t believe that being confined to the prison-like ward with the cell-like bedrooms that I saw her in this afternoon is going to do her any good either.