Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Did the old Gorbals really have to go? ‘The broad streets, flanked with their uncompromising cliffs of classical tenements diminishing into the distance, have an air of dilapidated, littered grandeur . . . a sort of stricken elegance,’ wrote a visitor while it still stood. But of course, behind that faded grandeur lay many years of landlord neglect-cum-exploitation and some harsh facts: acute overcrowding (87 per cent of Hutchesontown’s flats having only one or two rooms), few facilities (only 3 per cent having baths and only 22 per cent internal WCs) and many utterly squalid back courts, often used by small firms for such occupations as grease-manufacturing and fish-curing. In short, large-scale tenement refurbishment would have taken a long time and cost a lot of money – and the mood of the moment, as faithfully recorded by Borthwick, was for something altogether new and different. That at least was the Corporation’s mood, because we simply do not know about the wishes of the residents, who as usual were not properly consulted. What we do know, from a survey conducted later in 1956 by Glasgow University’s Tom Brennan, is that some 60 per cent wanted to stay in the immediate area – a wish that, under whatever form of redevelopment, was unlikely to be fulfilled.10

  The other city on the cusp of change was Liverpool. There, 1956 saw both the closure of the Overhead Railway (known locally as the docker’s umbrella) and the official opening in June of the ten-storey Cresswell Mount, dominating the Everton scene and the city’s first multi-storey dwelling block. ‘We thought deeply about whether it was going to be something that would meet our needs,’ explained Alderman David Nickson, chairman of the Housing Committee, about the whole question of going vertical. ‘As we can see today, it has proved itself very successful – something of which we can be proud.’

  If Cresswell Mount represented the future, Crown Street stood for what was poised to become the past. Abercromby ward lay to its west, Smithdown and Low Hill wards to its east, and together they constituted the inner-city, largely rundown ‘Crown Street area’ that sociologists from nearby Liverpool University (with John Barron Mays to the fore) sought to investigate earlier in 1956. A mixture of crumbling Georgian mansions and quietly decaying nineteenth-century terraced streets, this predominantly working-class (mainly unskilled) area comprised ‘slum’ property already destined for clearance and ‘twilight’ property that might or might not survive. It emerged from the survey that 36 per cent did not want to leave their present dwelling, that 25 per cent did want to change residence, but still stay within the locality, and that 39 per cent, fewer than two-fifths, wanted to move elsewhere. In terms of where they might move to, whether voluntarily or otherwise, there was particularly little desire to move to Kirkby, a huge new council estate on the outskirts of Liverpool that already had a population approaching forty thousand, almost entirely overspill from Liverpool’s slums and for whom the City Architect, Ronald Bradbury, had pioneered the ten-storey blocks later used on Everton Hill. Back in 1952, soon after the start of the Kirkby development, Barbara Castle had told the local Labour Party, ‘This is your chance to build a new Jerusalem.’ But four years on the message was yet to reach Crown Street.11

  Public housing was now – and would remain for the next decade or more – essentially numbers-driven, but to dip into the original reports of Mays and his colleagues is to be forcibly reminded of the primacy and variousness of individuals, with all their individual wants and circumstances:

  Old woman bed-ridden – very happy – delightful relationship with grand-daughter. Pleasant, clean atmosphere. Has lived in the house since 1917. Doesn’t think the neighbourhood is anything like it used to be. The old neighbours have gone. ‘We haven’t got the same class of people. Don’t run away with the idea that I think I’m it – but in the old days the children out on a Sunday were real well put on. Many a time I’ve kept our kids in because they weren’t nice enough for Sunday. (75-year-old widow, living with two daughters (tailoress and barmaid) and one grand-daughter)

  House is reached by steep and narrow stairs, quite unsuitable for old people. Coal has to be carried up, and rubbish down. As there is no backyard they cannot have a dustbin, so must dispose of rubbish as best they may, mainly on the living room fire. Cooking by coal range, no bathroom or hot water supply. Most courteous and informative. (65-year old watchman in children’s playground, living with wife and niece)

  Very distressed at living next door to pub – which has, in her opinion, got out of hand since a woman licensee took over. ‘It’s got my nerves to pieces. There was a thing in the Express “Why don’t they have singing in Liverpool pubs?” – believe me they do!’ (51-year-old cleaner, living with husband (warehouse porter) and two children)

  House old, damp, cramped, unhealthy and inconvenient, would like to move to an outlying estate. Cramped, untidy living room, unpleasant smell, which respondent voluntarily explained as due to the fact that the outside toilet leaks into the back kitchen. House infected by cockroaches. Corporation have been approached about this, but will charge £1 for disinfectation, and neither landlord nor tenant will pay. (24-year-old housewife, living with husband (deliverer for wholesale newsagent) and three young relatives)

  A well cared for, clean, tidy & well furnished house; wireless, T.V., thermostatic iron, children well-dressed, clean & tidy. General feeling of comfort & well-being, distressed at having to live in relatively mean surroundings. (29-year-old housewife, living with husband (plumber) and two small children)

  Horrifying visit. Mrs—— could only be described as a mound of decaying flesh. She was too vast to be able to move about – she was partially blind & partially deaf. Her face was covered with sores. The smell was inconceivable, although her room was reasonably clean & tidy & had recently been redecorated. She said her neighbours were very kind & always called in when passing to see if she wanted anything. (65-year-old widow)

  ‘Anywhere to get out of this area.’ Poor living conditions. There is no bath; water-supply from a tap in the yard; no back-kitchen – they cook in the bottom room; no sink. As they’re at the end of the row of houses, their water supply is poor, and all the dirt in the waste water clogs in their drain, & he has to get it out. Nevertheless, a very cheery young couple, who made me feel at home and were very friendly indeed. Can ‘pop in’ at any time. (31-year-old builder’s labourer living with wife and four young children)

  One interview was with a 28-year-old husband (a labourer at Threlfall Brewery), his 24-year-old wife (a press hand at Meccano) and her brother, a policeman, who happened to be there. The siblings did most of the talking. ‘They were very concerned about the state of England – what had happened to all her power? England had in the past done so much for backward countries & now they wanted nothing to do with her.’ And: ‘How shameful it is that such uneducated people as B & K were heads of state – they hadn’t even troubled to learn English – our royal family always took the trouble to learn some of the language of the people they were visiting.’ And finally: ‘They thought the survey a very good idea & “very good of us to do it”! They thought it very bad that in a free country when the Corporation wanted to pull down houses they merely gave the tenants notice to quit & gave them no choice for their new home.’12

  12

  The Real Razzle-Dazzle

  On 19 May 1956, 11 days after the premiere of Look Back in Anger, Elvis Presley entered the British charts for the first time with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, followed a fortnight later by ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ stayed in the Top 20 for the rest of the summer, but never quite made it to number 1 – unlike such mushy fare as Ronnie Hilton’s ‘No Other Love’ (four weeks), Pat Boone’s ‘I’ll Be Home’ (six weeks) and Doris Day’s ‘Whatever Will Be Will Be (Que Sera Sera)’ (five weeks). John Ravenscroft (later Peel) first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on Two-Way Family Favourites – where Presley was introduced as ‘the new American singing sensation’ – and the effect on him was ‘of a naked extraterrestrial walking through the door and announcing that he/she was going to live with m
e for the rest of my life’. There was ‘something frightening, something lewd, something seriously out of control about ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’, and alarmed though I was by Elvis, I knew I wanted more’. So too with Bill Perks (later Wyman), who on leave from National Service bought the record (shellac 78 rpm) and ‘played it with the windows to the street open until it wore out’.

  The fascination with the singer himself rapidly grew as film clips of his American television appearances occasionally surfaced. ‘It was nothing but Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley,’ remembered John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi. ‘In the end I said “Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner and tea.”’ The 14-year-old Roger Daltrey, at Acton Grammar School, boldly asked a 30-year-old teacher what he thought of Elvis and got the one-word answer, ‘Disgusting’. There was also huge resistance, to rock ’n’ roll generally as well as to Elvis, within the popular music establishment, led by Melody Maker: first the jazz-loving Steve Race condemned ‘the cheap, nasty lyrics on which the Rock and Roll movement thrives’, and then Jack Payne (bandleader turned disc jockey) declared of Presley, ‘Personally, I don’t like his work and nor will, I feel, the vast majority of our listening public.’ But as the summer went on, the rock ’n’ roll craze became increasingly irresistible, with rock ’n’ roll dancing even at the Durham Miners’ Gala in July, under the largely tolerant gaze of more elderly onlookers. It was a craze, rapidly taken up by teddy boys, with a strongly sartorial aspect – ‘He turns revolt into a style,’ wrote Thom Gunn in 1957 in his poem ‘Elvis Presley’ – while with airplay very limited from the starchy BBC, the mushrooming coffee bars (complete with large, coin-operated American jukeboxes) played a key role in disseminating the new sound. Not all youth succumbed, however. ‘In the study I was in [at Shrewsbury School] when rock ’n’ roll entered my life,’ recalled Peel, ‘the records of choice were a recording of Handel’s Zadok the Priest from the Coronation of George VI and a recording of the same king’s magnificent wartime speech in which he quoted from the poem “A man stood at the gate of the year”.’1

  After Osborne, after Presley, May 1956 still had two further cultural fireworks up its sleeve. ‘One of the most remarkable first books I have read for a long time,’ declared Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times on the 27th, ‘an exhaustive and luminously intelligent study of a representative theme of our time’, portentously agreed Philip Toynbee the same day in the Observer, and over the next week or so there followed almost unstinting critical praise, as well as instant best-seller status. The philosophical-cum-literary treatise was Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, the author was 24, and he was widely (if incorrectly) rumoured to have slept nightly on Hampstead Heath while going each day to the British Museum Reading Room to research and write it. There were a couple of cooler assessments – ‘a young man has made a desperate attempt to make sense of the conflicting visions of life that have been thrown at him by an immense variety of books’, noted the TLS on 8 June, while a week later Kingsley Amis in the Spectator argued that the best cure for the adolescent, self-obsessed Outsider was ‘ordering up another bottle, attending a jam session, or getting introduced to a young lady’ – but nothing could stop the phenomenon, one of whose instant effects was to get Ronald Laing writing The Divided Self. It was a phenomenon that by July had become part of a broader ‘Angry Young Men’ phenomenon, essentially a publicity-driven creation that identified the very disparate figures of Osborne, Wilson and Amis as core members, though in fact they were similar only in their lower middle-class origins and robust heterosexuality. There was no place for the 42-year-old Angus Wilson, for whom 1956 was a difficult year: during the spring his play at the Royal Court, The Mulberry Bush, was comprehensively overshadowed by Osborne’s, while in the early summer his ambitious, Dickensian new novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, was widely praised (except by Amis, who called it ‘clearly a failure’), but somehow failed to chime with the zeitgeist.2 Still, even for an AYM the spirit of the times could shift with alarming rapidity.

  May’s other firework was the first major triumph on home soil for Theatre Workshop, the company based at the Theatre Royal in Stratford (two stops on from Bethnal Green) and the creation of a remarkable working-class, left-wing visionary director, Joan Littlewood. Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow, a prison-yard drama only previously performed in Dublin, had its London debut on the 24th, with no Irishmen in the cast (which included Richard Harris and Brian Murphy), but plenty in the audience, among them several of Behan’s old IRA comrades. Reviewing the first night, Brian Inglis noted ‘an extraordinary decision to play the Irish national anthem in the middle’, with the result that ‘one section of the audience stood, wondering whether it ought to be sitting, and another section sat, wondering whether it ought to be standing’. At the end, when the mandatory ‘God Save the Queen’ was played and most people stood, the IRA contingent remained firmly seated. Behan’s unsentimental, bawdy, moving play had a considerable impact and was widely praised (including by Kenneth Tynan), with its abolitionist message having a particular resonance because of the continuing Parliamentary debate about possible suspension of the death penalty. A few weeks later, Behan himself made a famously drunken appearance on Panorama, where he was interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge and managed little more coherent than ‘I want a leak’, but the publicity did not damage his play, which transferred to the West End in July. ‘Just the sort of thing one might expect from the leftist Theatre Workshop to produce’ was Anthony Heap’s predictable verdict about this ‘propaganda play written by some Irish ruffian’, though he conceded that Littlewood’s production ‘makes the utmost of the very raw material on hand’.

  Another Irish playwright was entertaining the sticks. Waiting for Godot had ended its run at the Criterion in March – ‘Couldn’t make head or tail of it,’ reported Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford after arriving ‘rather tight for the second act only’ – before in late May embarking on a provincial run, with original cast, that included weeks at Harrow, Cambridge, Bournemouth, Streatham (‘where they threw pennies on the stage on the first night’, recorded Pozzo, aka Peter Bull, ‘but never into the box-office during the week’), Golders Green and Birmingham. Week three of a testing tour that frayed the nerves of all concerned was at Britain’s premier seaside resort. Advertised as ‘inimitable’ and ‘priceless’, Beckett’s play arrived at the Grand Theatre, Blackpool on Monday, 4 June, to find itself up against stiff competition: The Dave King Show at the Winter Gardens Pavilion, Albert Modley (supported by Mike and Bernie Winters) starring in Summer Showboat at the Palace Theatre, and, twice nightly at the Central Pier, Let’s Have Fun with Jimmy James, Ken Dodd and Jimmy Clitheroe. It proved to be, reported the local paper, ‘one of the stormiest receptions in the theatrical history of Blackpool’, as ‘a large body of the audience beat a disorganised retreat from the auditorium, others stayed and displaying appalling manners made interjections which must have been audible to those on the stage, and some remained in their seats to enjoy this remarkable play’. It did not help that the audience included a party of OAPs, paying only a shilling each, but far from convinced by the second act that they were getting value for it, and according to Bull’s account fewer than 100 altogether of the audience were left at the end, having started at some 700. ‘We took one quick curtain,’ he added, ‘and there were rumours of the police being called out for “our special safety” as it says on some fire curtains.’ Houses for the rest of the week were very poor, and by Saturday evening the cast were so desperate to leave town that they agreed on a pause-free performance in order to catch the last London train from Preston – ‘oddly enough’, recalled Bull, ‘the only performance that seemed to go remotely well in Blackpool and, needless to say, we were on the verge of maniacal laughter throughout’.3

  In the poetry world there were three signal moments this summer: at the Sheldonian in Oxford, W. H. Auden’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry – ‘1¼ hours straight down the middle of t
he pitch about what poetry was,’ noted Lavinia Mynors, and read out ‘inexorably in a harsh northcountry voice’; the secret marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in what she called ‘the dim little church’ of St George the Martyr in Bloomsbury; and the appearance of New Lines, a ‘Movement’ anthology edited by Robert Conquest, and including poems by Larkin and Amis among others, that sought, declared Conquest in his introduction, to be ‘empirical in its attitude to all that comes’ and to maintain ‘a rational structure and comprehensible language’, rejecting ‘diffuse and sentimental verbiage, or hollow technical pirouettes’. Film of the summer was undoubtedly Reach for the Sky, the life story of the disabled war hero Douglas Bader – ‘a very moving and stirring picture’, according to Heap, made all the better by Kenneth More’s ‘brilliant underplaying of the character’ – while a movie in prospect was the tantalising coupling of Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe in what became The Prince and the Showgirl. She arrived at a wet London Airport on 14 July to start filming at Pinewood, and right from the start there was little Anglo-American chemistry. ‘SLO is much too remote,’ recorded Colin Clark (son of Kenneth, brother of Alan and employed on the set in a lowly role). ‘He’s going to be her director and that should be a close relationship, but he is quite clearly not in any way concerned with her personally.’ Eight days before Monroe’s arrival, Hancock’s Half Hour made its small-screen debut. It was a medium for which ‘his infinitely expressive, melted-down features seemed made’, recalls an appreciative Simon Callow, and although one member of the BBC’s Viewing Panel found the first episode ‘senseless bilge from beginning to end’, most ‘praised it without reservation’. A sense of discontent, the world never quite matching up to his hopes, ran deep in the Hancock persona, and there was no shortage of Tory malcontents this summer, with mass middle-class abstentions almost losing the party a by-election at Tonbridge. ‘Those who have shouldered their “personal responsibility” and asserted the “rights of the individual” find themselves worse positioned than those who have bilked the State at every turn,’ declared a letter to the Sunday Times in its immediate wake, while another writer stated that as a result of the credit squeeze ‘the middle class now perceives quite clearly that it is expected to subscribe to total self-extinction’. Modernisation might or might not save the day. On 12 June, Fred Hackett from Newton-le-Willows drove his bulldozer through a hedge in a Lancashire field, marking the start of construction of the Preston Bypass – the first part of what would become the M6. ‘A road designed exclusively for the use of motor traffic’ was how, next day, the Manchester Guardian explained the still novel concept of ‘the motorway’.4