A few months later, Philip Larkin visited his mother at Carlton Hayes Hospital, near Narborough in Leicestershire, where she was being treated for some form of mental illness or instability. ‘Large and dingy as a London terminus,’ he told a friend, ‘it was filled with the apathetic or moping inmates and their stolid families and in the very centre stood a tea trolley, at which a small queue endlessly waited.’ The only thing he could compare it to was ‘a German expressionist film’, and he added that ‘around the walls and corridors lingered the hospital servants (all harmless certifieds) grinning as you passed’. Mercifully, there were some exceptions. ‘A place of calm and lightness, set in beautiful gardens maintained by the patients,’ was how Ken Worpole half a century later recalled visiting his father in Runwell Hospital, one of the larger Essex asylums. ‘It was designed on a parkland-villa system of low-rise buildings, with patients organized into smaller residential groups, and was run with great dedication by medical staff who supported the ideals of the therapeutic community movement.’
Friern, though, was almost certainly more typical, and as Heap suggested, this was still the era of physical methods of treatment, principally threefold: ECT (electroconvulsive treatment), deep insulin therapy (involving risky, even fatal comas) and pre-frontal leucotomy. However, the last two treatments were being increasingly questioned by the mid-1950s, and from about this point the focus moved more to powerful new psychotropic drugs such as chlorpromazine, marketed from 1954 as Largactil. The dramatic emergence of these tranquillisers undoubtedly helped to shift the balance of psychiatric opinion away from institutional care and towards treatment in the community, but the historian Simon Goodwin has emphasised the role of other important ‘new initiatives’ by the 1950s, such as ‘the “open door” policy, the development and use of new physical treatments, and the “de-designation” of some mental hospital beds’, all of which ‘reflected the increased emphasis being given to the treatment, rather than simple containment, of mentally ill people’. One young psychiatrist, based in the mid-1950s at Glasgow’s Gartnavel Royal Mental Hospital, preferred to go his own way. There, Ronald Laing set up the so-called Rumpus Room, in which a dozen particularly unpopular, seriously disturbed patients were removed from the danger and smell of the wards, placed in pleasant surroundings, allowed to wear ordinary clothes and treated by carefully selected nurses as real human beings with real human feelings. This largely successful experiment became the basis for the book he started writing in 1956 – The Divided Self.3
Elsewhere on the medical front, two diseases in the news in 1956 were polio and lung cancer. ‘After much doubt and hesitation,’ recorded Heap in March, ‘decide to apply to have Frainy [his young son] inoculated with the new anti-polio vaccine, with which the first so many thousand children between the ages of two and nine are, if the parents agree, to be injected this summer.’ This was the first year that the vaccine was available, and as yet, quite apart from parental misgivings, there were not sufficient quantities. Accordingly, some 3,000 people (mostly children) contracted polio during the summer’s epidemic, though in the year as a whole only 114 died, one of the lower post-war totals up to this point. As for lung cancer and its causal link with smoking, the new Health Minister, Robin Turton, took much the same stance as his predecessor Macleod: a public acceptance that the two were probably linked, but a disinclination either to stop smoking himself or to wage a public-information campaign. Anyway, there was little political will for such a campaign: ‘I only hope it won’t stop people smoking!’ noted Macmillan (suddenly conscious of the Treasury’s fiscal needs) of Turton’s May statement, while about the same time Rab Butler reflected that the government should not ‘assume too lightly the odium of advising the general public on their personal tastes and habits where the evidence of harm which may result is not conclusive’. The issue was raised on Any Questions? following Turton’s statement, and after the countryman Ralph Wightman had related how he had begun smoking at the age of 11, his fellow-panellist Ted Leather, a Tory MP, told jokes about Churchill’s smoking. And not long afterwards, at its annual conference at Brighton, it was only with considerable reluctance, amid vocal protest, that the BMA agreed on a one-day smoking ban during proceedings. Still, Kingsley Amis in Swansea was taking no chances. ‘I have taken to using a filter-holder,’ he confessed to Larkin later in the year, ‘in dear smear dread of l+ng-c+nc+r, and chose the more modest, less ornate type of the two offered. It is the lady’s type, I find.’4
Inevitably, for all its understandably alluring promise of universalism, not everyone benefited equally from the NHS. Fyfe Robertson asserted in 1954, on the basis of survey evidence, that it had ‘made least difference to poorer employed people, and most to women (especially middle-aged) and the old of both sexes’, adding that ‘the difference has been greatest among the lower-paid middle class’. Provision undeniably varied. Taylor in the early 1950s, researching Good General Practice, found that the less effective, lower-grade GPs tended to be in working-class industrial areas, while in purely quantitative terms, the ‘obstructionism of the BMA’ (in the words of Charles Webster, historian of the NHS) largely blocked attempts to correct regional imbalances in the supply of GPs – imbalances that heavily favoured ‘the metropolitan regions and their neighbours’. As for take-up, an official 1955–6 survey of general practice revealed that patient consulting rates were failing to compensate for the well-known class bias in national patterns of mortality and morbidity. The same applied, noted Abel-Smith and Titmuss in their research for Guillebaud, to working-class use of hospital services, which anyway were available very unevenly around the country, with for instance Sheffield Regional Health Board having only nine beds available per thousand population, compared to the South West Metropolitan RHB’s fifteen.5
What about the elderly, who along with women generally were, according to Robertson, the great beneficiaries? No doubt they did benefit overall, but another NHS historian, Geoffrey Rivett, has drawn on a 1954 national survey of services for the elderly to paint a less sanguine picture: GPs sometimes no longer referring elderly patients because of long waiting lists; hospital accommodation often ‘in long rambling draughty buildings far from other hospital services’, with in one case ‘an outside cast-iron staircase’ serving ‘one ward on the first floor over a boiler-house and a paint store’; and physicians who either ‘did not believe in geriatrics’ or were indifferent. Indeed, it seems to have been axiomatic among hospital administrators and health authorities that geriatric patients, being ‘chronic’, only merited a lower budget, including for food, than acute patients. Altogether, as Abel-Smith and Titmuss concluded in their study, ‘by and large the older age groups’ were ‘currently receiving a lower standard of service than the main body of consumers’ and there were ‘substantial areas of unmet need among the elderly’. Put another way, a war had been won, a new world was being constructed, and it was not the old who represented the future.
Poverty was an almost taboo word in 1950s Britain, but that – despite the best efforts of the Welfare State – was what sizeable pockets of elderly people still lived in. A quartet from Bethnal Green spoke to Peter Townsend in around 1955:
When we were both working we had £10 a week coming in. If we wanted to buy something for dinner, we went out and got it. Now anything a bit tasty is out. But it’s when you’re getting on you need it. I’m telling you this in confidence. People think we’re comfortable and I wouldn’t have them know otherwise. But we’re not . . .
I used to have two pints of milk a day, and I said to the milkman, ‘I don’t like to owe you money,’ so after that I’d only have one pint. We used to have eggs for supper, or a kipper, but not now. We have p’rhaps a bit of toast. But we always have dinner. We always have something hot. We had to cut down on everything, I can tell you. He [her husband] doesn’t even smoke now. And he doesn’t drink. But I like a drink when I can, I don’t mind admitting. And he has to put his shilling on the pools . . .
I don’
t have any breakfast. I mostly have boiled beef when I get meat, and with it I have carrots or parsnips or brussels sprouts and potatoes. Sometimes I make myself a pease pudding . . .
The money goes like anything. It costs me a £1 for my rations. Last Saturday our joint was 7s 6d and it was only a little one, but we spun it out till Monday . . . We can’t afford luxuries. I just have a bit of toast for breakfast and a cup of tea. I can’t afford eggs . . .
In many such cases, Townsend asked why they had not applied for the still means-tested National Assistance. ‘I’ve never liked to cadge’, replied one, another that ‘I don’t want to tell people all my affairs’, a third that ‘I’d starve rather than ask for a penny’.6
Would they have agreed with Macmillan when in 1955 he privately described the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, as ‘suffering from the endemic disease of Scandinavia (esp Sweden) – gutlessness’ and hypothesised: ‘I suppose after another generation or two of the Welfare State we shall be the same!’? Or with Gilbert Harding when the following year, in his preface to The Gilbert Harding Question Book (devised by W. H. Mason, pipe-smoking Senior English Master of Manchester Grammar School), he complained that ‘this is an age of moving pictures, gramophone records, radio, television – all for nothing or for so little as to make them not worth having’, adding ‘that is what I suppose is meant by living in a welfare State’? Perhaps they would, but the problem of poverty as such, and not only among the elderly, was unlikely to disappear overnight. Much of course turned on definitions, but in a retrospective study of a 1953–4 Ministry of Labour national survey of the expenditure and income of nearly 13,000 households, Townsend found that a total of roughly 5.3 million people – including 1.75 million primarily dependent on wages – were in what could reasonably be described as poverty. Even so, a poll in 1956 showing that 49 per cent of mothers neither recognised nor were able to define the term ‘welfare state’ must have been somewhat disconcerting to those emotionally committed to the welfare state and its founding values.7 And they might even have speculated that, should a ‘New Right’ ever take shape and attain critical mass, the popular opposition to it might turn out to be dangerously flaky.
1956 was notable for so many reasons, including in relation to the urban environment. To take a mere ten: the Clean Air Act came on the statute book (four years after the infamous London smog) and, although dealing only with smoke rather than with industrial pollution generally, would among other benefits double Manchester’s quota of winter sunshine; the Ideal Home Exhibition featured a Smithsons-designed ‘House of the Future’, a rectangular, windowless box that was gadget-filled, but without private space; on his father getting a job at the de Havilland factory, the ten-year-old Donovan Leitch (the future folk singer) moved from inner-city Glasgow to Hatfield New Town in Hertfordshire and discovered rus in urbe; an office-building boom was under way, especially in London, with Sir Howard Robertson’s design for the Shell building on the South Bank being shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, a design that – according to one appraisal soon after – ‘lies heavily on the human spirit, redolent with undertones of 1984’; the new Housing Subsidies Act made it much more advantageous for local authorities to build high-rise, giving three times as much subsidy for a flat in a fifteen-storey block as for a house; the Irish dramatist Brendan Behan visited Leeds and, he told the New Statesman, ‘saw, with interest as a former slum dweller and building worker, the beautiful flats at Quarry Hill estate’, the 1938 showcase of municipal flat-building; that estate’s creator and still City Architect for Leeds, R.A.H. Livett, told the Yorkshire Post that he no longer believed in rehousing families in flats and that it was ‘the speculative builder’ who had the right answer, in that ‘he builds semi-detached houses because he knows what the people want’ – a recantation that came too late to stop the high-rise juggernaut in his city; in Bristol, a rundown but still viable Georgian area, Kingsdown, that was rumoured to be on the condemned list was visited by a young local journalist, Tom Stoppard, who found himself enchanted by ‘a glimpse of a quieter contented world’ and concluded that ‘the traditionalists are right’; John Betjeman spoke (‘Let us not write the Victorians off as no good’) in protest at the proposed demolition of the City of London’s ‘impressive, vast and exquisitely detailed’ Coal Exchange for the purpose of road-widening; and in Newcastle, an unemployed, one-eyed Welshman, Jimmy Forsyth, acquired an aged Rolleiflex camera and started making a visual record of the Scotswood Road area just as it began to be razed.8
In 1956 there were two cities – both with sectarian divisions, both with apparently solid commercial and industrial bases, both larger-than-life – that were particularly on the cusp of fundamental change.
One was Glasgow, the British city with the worst housing problems. There, in varying degrees, the three not mutually exclusive solutions of dispersal beyond the city boundaries, dispersal to just inside the city boundaries and inner-city redevelopment were all being pursued. The Tory government in the 1950s designated only one New Town, and that was Cumbernauld in late 1955, some 13 miles to the north-east and specifically intended for Glasgow overspill. The choice of site owed much to the agricultural lobby’s refusal to yield the best land, which in turn resulted in a far from ideal open, hilly setting, susceptible to frequent rain and strong winds. ‘I want to see a compact urban area, with higher overall densities than have been adopted in most of the post-war schemes [ie including the existing New Towns], achieved, not by a lowering of standards, but by the use of higher blocks and the omission of much of the so-called “amenity” open space (expensive to maintain and inimical to urbanity),’ Hugh Wilson explained soon after his appointment in 1956 as chief architect and planning officer of Britain’s 15th New Town. ‘We have,’ he added, ‘an opportunity to design a “cellular” town, the houses within walking distance of the centre,’ which itself would be pedestrianised, and he clung tenaciously to the concept of Cumbernauld Hill as the focus for a tight-knit settlement that would not be too alienating for deeply urbanised Glaswegians.
Dispersal to some 4 or 5 miles out was the fate for the 130,000 or so people destined for the four giant peripheral estates, mainly comprising rows of three- and four-storey flats. Pollok to the south-west of the city was more or less completed by the mid-1950s, Drumchapel to the north-west and Castlemilk to the south-east had tenants moving in by 1955, and Easterhouse to the north-east had its first tenants arriving in October 1956. ‘The great challenge to the tenants of many of the new Glasgow housing estates is that of remoteness,’ asserted the Glasgow Herald two months later. ‘The men are aware of remoteness from their work; the women of remoteness from shops . . . and perhaps also remoteness from relatives and friends to whom they could formerly turn in times of trouble . . .’ There were other serious problems in what the historian Seán Damer has called these ‘windswept canyons’, including lack of facilities (especially shops, schools, entertainment and transport) and lack of open spaces. Castlemilk was typical – described by another historian, Charles Johnstone, as ‘a high-density residential area where you could not even get a haircut without travelling into the city centre’.
Yet the probability is that at this point the great majority of Castlemilk’s new residents were broadly happy to be there, at least to judge by their recollections over thirty years after arriving:
I moved from Bluevale Street in the east end in October 1955. We got to Castlemilk in the dark and there was no light on the stair. We took the furniture up the stairs by the light of a bicycle lamp. We had no gas connected and no light. We couldn’t even light a fire because the coal nest was missing! You had to depend on neighbours that day – being kind and giving you hot water and heating up your dinner. But everybody rallied round. You knew your neighbours because we all came together and moved up the same close or round about – so it didn’t feel too bad. (Nan Tierney)
I QUALIFIED! I had been on the housing list for twelve years. You had to come up to be at the allocation o
f the new houses. I wanted top flat, 2 up and I got it! I had lived ground floor before in a room and kitchen. We moved into our 3 apartment in Croftfoot Road in March 1956. My husband and family were all delighted. (Agnes Dickson)
We moved into our five apartment in Croftfoot Road [in 1956]. We had both a back and front garden for the very first time. I had four children and soon my back door became the meeting place for all the kids. I would make candy and tablet and my husband would have a ball for them to play with. Sitting at the front you would have a blether to folk as they passed. (Isa Robertson)
We moved into a flat in Glenacre Drive in 1957. In the old tenement back-courts, everything was divided by railings and there wasn’t much light because of the high tenement buildings. Here everything was so bright, clean and green. (May Martin)
Thoroughly unhappy were those living in the nearby private housing estates of Croftfoot and Cathcart. ‘A complaint was made that following the occupation of houses in Castlemilk numerous depredations have occurred in Croftfoot gardens,’ balefully noted the Cathcart Ward Committee in late 1955. ‘Flowers have been destroyed and coal stolen. Young children had been hawking papers on Sundays in the avenues . . .’9
As for inner-city redevelopment, the first area chosen was the highly symbolic Gorbals, specifically its Hutchesontown part. By 1954 plans were on display by Corporation architects who envisaged its transformation into a series of tower blocks – to the horror of Frederic Osborn. In Town and Country Planning that June he not only offered a detailed analysis of why this approach would cost far more than a predominantly low-density solution, with the unhoused to go to overspill, but pleaded with the Corporation to consider ‘family living conditions 25, 50, or 100 years ahead’. It was to no avail. ‘This time there will be no rubber-stamp semi-detacheds,’ declared a local journalist, Alastair Borthwick, in his ‘Scottish Diary’ for the News Chronicle. ‘The ground is too valuable. This time they will have to build upwards, monumentally. Also, the slate will be clean. The man who gets the job will be able to compose an entire town within a city.’ The following April, the Corporation finally gave its go-ahead. ‘In place of drab four-storey tenements in hollow squares,’ reported the Glasgow Herald, ‘there will be well-spaced housing, a striking feature of which will be towering blocks of flats of 10 storeys or more mingled with flats of the more orthodox type up to four storeys, roughly in the proportion of 50 per cent of the multi-storey type.’ Some accompanying figures took the eye: of the 26,860 people living in the area, only 10,179 would be rehoused there; the existing 444 shops would be replaced by four shopping centres containing a total of 57 shops; and 48 pubs would be reduced to nine.
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 76