Nella Last in the 1950s

by Patricia Malcolmson

  Much of the praise given to the Mass Observation Archive is also praise for the work of Dorothy Sheridan, who headed it for many years and bears a major responsibility for its successes and the high regard in which it is held, and we are grateful for the assistance that she has given us, in various respects, during the past decade. Our editors at Profile Books, Daniel Crewe and Lisa Owens, have aided and advised us in all sorts of ways. We very much value their helpful comments on our work, their suggestions for changes, and their enthusiasm for the richness of the Mass Observation collection.

  Cobourg, Ontario

  June 2010

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  (1) Nella and Will Last, and their dog Garry. Courtesy of Peter Last.

  (2) The Lasts’ elder son, Arthur, with his wife Edith and their sons, Peter and Christopher, around late 1952. Courtesy of Peter Last.

  (3) The Lasts’ younger son, Cliff, a sculptor in Australia. Courtesy of Peter Last.

  (4) End of a shift at ‘the Yard’ © North-West Evening Mail.

  (5) The exodus © North-West Evening Mail.

  (6) The WVS in Barrow, February 1953 © North-West Evening Mail.

  (7) Flooding on the Coast Road © North-West Evening Mail.

  (8) Nella Last, Christmas 1958. Courtesy of the Mass Observation Archive.

  1. Nella and Will Last, and their dog Garry. Nella once wrote of Will’s attachment to his car: ‘after me, it’s his chief anchor to life and living’

  2. The Lasts’ elder son, Arthur, with his wife Edith and their sons, Peter and Christopher, around late 1952

  3. The Lasts’ younger son, Cliff, a sculptor in Australia

  4. End of a shift at ‘the Yard’, Barrow’s dominant industry

  5. The daily exodus from the shipyard

  6. The WVS collect clothes for flood victims in Eastern England, 6 February 1953

  7. Flooding on the Coast Road, where the Lasts often drove to Ulverston and the Lake District

  8. Nella Last on a pier on Morecambe Bay, Christmas 1958

  *Nella Last’s War: The Second World War Diaries of ‘Housewife, 49’ (Profile Books, 2006; first published 1981); and Nella Last’s Peace: The Post-War Diaries of ‘Housewife, 49’ (Profile Books, 2008).

  *‘I’ve asked if he wouldn’t feel happier if we slept together,’ Nella wrote of her husband on 10 June 1950, ‘but he said he “liked to be free to toss and turn, without disturbing you”, and I didn’t argue about it. To shut my bedroom door sometimes and begin to write or read quietly is a privilege when things haven’t gone smoothly in the day.’

  **Nella once remarked on the city’s distinctive character. ‘I think in Barrow, by its isolation on the map, we tend to be neither North or South, just ourselves’ (17 February 1949).

  *She is referring to the abdication of the throne by Edward VIII in 1936 in order to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson. King Farouk of Egypt (b. 1920, king from 1936) was notably corrupt and incompetent, and was overthrown in 1952.

  *We have not succeeded in identifying this (apparent) medication or tonic.

  *On the evening of 12 January, the patrol submarine Truculent, which had been built in Barrow and launched in 1942, collided with a Swedish ship in the Thames estuary and sank. Sixty-four men lost their lives. Building submarines was a speciality of Barrow’s shipyard.

  *J. B. Priestley’s ‘The Labour Plan Works’, one of a series of party political broadcasts, was published in The Listener, 19 January 1950, pp. 112–13. Priestley did, indeed, profess political humility and a common-sense outlook. His socialist thinking was not to Nella’s taste.

  *Nella is almost certainly referring to Pagliacci, the 1892 opera by Ruggero Leoncavallo about a company of strolling players, including a clown. As one authoritative account of the opera remarks, ‘It is the old and ever effective story of the buffoon who must laugh, and make others laugh, while his heart is breaking’ (The Earl of Harewood, ed., Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book [London: Bodley Head, 10th edn, 1987), p. 552).

  *Maurice Webb was a political journalist and broadcaster, a Labour MP and Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He had spoken on the radio two nights before (published in The Listener, 2 February 1950, pp. 201–2), and Nella had described his speech as ‘a triumph of wishful thinking mixed with sincere conviction. If things could be as rosy and serene as some of the Labour speakers make out.’

  **‘I broke my pelvis and hip bone at 5, and for many years limped badly and seemed to always have pain’ (diary, 2 March 1953).

  *Will, who was waiting for new glasses, had been unable to read and thus Nella found it necessary to read to him, taking pains to omit items in the news or fictional stories that might alarm him.

  *Later that week Mrs Higham was visiting, and she ‘was really shocked when he went on to tell her he had “never believed in any kind of insurance“, and she learned that I’d have nothing from any source if he died’ (23 February 1950).

  **Megan Lloyd George (1902–66), daughter of David Lloyd George and a Liberal MP from 1929 to 1951 – she later joined the Labour Party – championed radical causes in her party, whereas other Liberals were moving, or had already moved, to support Conservative positions, a trend that Nella approved of.

  *In fact, women did not at that time have the vote, except in some local elections.

  *‘This interest he has taken in the election has been a pleasure to both of us’, she wrote the next day. ‘I wish something else would come along.’

  *Nella means that the somewhat meek and reticent committee members, who had been pushed around by the domineering Mrs Waite, retaliated by being active, assertive and effective.

  *Negotiations were under way to sell the joinery shop to Billy Newington, who, according to Nella on 3 March, ‘has been carrying on the business, more or less’, during Will’s struggles. But Billy had little cash – Nella was shocked at his and his wife’s disinclination to save – and he had been offered a loan by an accountant, a relative, on condition that the lender be given half the profits of the business. ‘Billy at 37 has less sense’ than her own sons ‘had at 17 at thinking for themselves’, she wrote on 9 March.

  *Two days before Nella had written that Billy and Ida’s ‘lovely little girl of 2½ is dressed like a film star’s child. White kid boots, white fur coat, etc., but I felt shocked at their lack of thrift.’

  *Albert Modley (born in Liverpool in 1901) and Norman Evans (born in Rochdale, also in 1901) were variety entertainers and comedians.

  *‘I love to wander round on market day in Ulverston’, Nella wrote on Thursday 22 June 1950. ‘Born and bred in a town, so much of my childhood’s happiest memories are of Gran’s farm on the hills, coming to market in the gig, meeting kindly country neighbours. The smell of freshly cut and dug vegetables or the sight of a patient shaggy horse is akin to the feeling I get by Coniston Lake – not exactly an escape as much as a reality, something firm and strong in my life.’

  *The Windmill Theatre in London was famous for its (more or less) nude performers. Two years later Nella made her views on nudity clear. ‘As for people who have little or no clothes on, well, they haven’t, and that’s that. I never could see anything shocking in nude or semi-nude figures, always provided they weren’t gross untidy ones’ (12 June 1952). By the standards of her time, Nella did not hold particularly rigid views concerning sexual propriety. On 1 February 1951 she borrowed from the library a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock, though she did not report what she thought of it.

  *Margaret, the younger daughter of the Atkinsons, a great favourite of Nella’s in the 1940s, had married Arthur Procter, a schoolteacher, in August 1949. They were soon to move to a new home near Bacup, Lancashire, in the South Pennines, near the border with Yorkshire.

  *On his initiative, Will and Nella had ceased to sleep together, and probably ceased to have sexual relations, by 1942 at the latest.

  *On Monday the 21st Nella was back in Rampside to view the wedding presents. There was no sign of austeri
ty, and she was much impressed. ‘I never saw such a collection of “covetable” things. It looked as if the cream had been skimmed from every good shop in town – latest model wireless set, Hoover vac, a full set of Community tableware. Cheques had been pooled and dozens of everything bought. There were fish eaters and carvers, Prestige kitchen gadgets, antiques, electric toasters (2), coffee percolator, kettles (2), trays, cut glass, blankets and linen and towels and table linen to last them for years, an electric clock for the bedroom and two for downstairs rooms, luncheon sets, two tea sets and a small dinner set to match one of them, every type of useful oddment like heavy pans in aluminium for a gas or electric stove, bread and cake tins and set for the pantry shelf, all in cream and green, eiderdowns – it seemed nothing they could need or desire had been left out. We had a cup of tea before we came away.’

  *All this gossip may have been prompted by false information, for there is no evidence from the BBC Written Archives that William Chislett was in any way connected with this broadcast on 11 September. The writer of ‘The World of Movement’ on the Home Service was a Martin Chisholm, and this could be the source of the error.

  *Two days later Nella’s tone was more buoyant. ‘We were so glad to see the Oronsay riding proudly and straight in the water. I hear they are going to endeavour to get it finished on the arranged date, so there will be a lot of overtime for many men’ (31 October). The Oronsay, at 28,200 tons, was reputed to be the largest passenger liner then being built in Britain.

  *Power cuts were frequent this autumn in Barrow. Nella’s neighbourhood experienced at least one or two cuts almost every week from mid-September.

  *Thorstein of the Mere: A Saga of the Northmen in Lakeland (1895), by W. G. Collingwood (1854–1932). Norman Birkett, an eminent barrister and judge, was born in Ulverston and educated at Barrow-in-Furness Grammar School.

  *‘Mrs Salisbury has no idea of diet and is an atrocious cook’, according to Nella on 18 October, though she did not fault her for lack of effort, which included taking in boarders. ‘In August when the couple she had living with her left, she couldn’t get another – it’s rather far out for Shipyard men. She was talking of Xmas, rising prices and her increasing efforts to make ends meet. She does try in every way for her family, and she is such a friendly faithful little creature.’

  **The Prime Minister was in the American capital for talks with President Truman and senior American officials. Britain was striving to contain the increasingly dangerous conflict in Korea (China had actively intervened in November) and discourage the use of atomic weapons. The speech Nella refers to was probably the one Attlee gave at the National Press Club in Washington that day (The Times, 7 December 1950, p. 4b).

  *Edith Last was about to give birth to her second child. Christopher was born the next day.

  *Frisby Dyke was a slow-witted Northern character, played by Deryck Guyler, in the famous radio comedy programme It’s That Man Again, starring Tommy Handley (it was cancelled after his death in 1949). See also below, 11 March 1952.

  *The military situation in Korea was to stabilise in early 1951, partly through the sound direction of General Matthew Ridgway. Nella’s disapproval of General MacArthur was shared by most Britons. President Truman was to fire him, although he was a darling of the American political right, in April 1951.

  *As Nella noted some weeks later, ‘rising chemist’s bills’ for all these medications and supplements were ‘never budgeted for before’ and were now very much straining her household economy (8 May).

  **‘I don’t know why I do spend 1s on a postal order every week “in hopes”’, she had written earlier this month regarding football pools. ‘I think I’m the type who always has to work for what they get!’ (10 January). A few days later she was thinking of booking tickets for ‘the Show Boat by Barrow amateurs. I would so have liked to go, but it would have been 11s for us to go, and bus fares and programme another 1s 6d, and I just haven’t got it to spare. I hoped he would be sufficiently interested to say he would pay’ (2 February).

  *They were attending the St George’s WVS dinner. When Mrs Howson brought Nella her ticket for this event, ‘I thought of the 8s 6d and would rather have spent it on a bus trip to Ambleside. She said gloomily, “I’m not looking forward to it – are you?” I said, “not particularly. I dread taking off a woollen dress and putting on a thin silk one to sit in that big draughty room”’ (13 April 1951).

  *‘Thank goodness for a tiny income of my own’, she had written the previous day.

  *Abbey House was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and mostly built just before the First World War. It was sold to the local Corporation after the Second World War and officially opened as a home for the elderly on 1 March 1951, after renovations that allowed it to accommodate 5 married couples and 45 single men and women (North-Western Evening Mail, 1 March 1951, p. 6, and 15 September 1978, p. 4).

  *‘I thought’, she wrote on 11 March 1951, ‘of the bad nervous breakdown I had when having both of them in rages and sulks’ around 1936 when Cliff had gone to work with his father in the joinery shop.

  *That is, to benefit from the wealth or possessions of another person.

  *The sea was sometimes the source of other valuable resources – no purchase required. On 16 June 1952, after going to Walney, Nella reported that high winds ‘have brought seaweed in, so good for the compost, and everyone with a garden – and a car – likes to get it. We got two small sacks and put it in the boot of the car, and then had a long walk on the sands on the fringe of the incoming tide.’

  *She had it steamed to a new shape, which is possible with a felt hat.

  *Cliff was to become a distinguished sculptor in Australia. Some of the highlights of his life’s work are presented in Geoffrey Edwards, Clifford Last Retrospective (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1989). In 1953 Nella judged one of Cliff’s carvings (she saw a photo of it) to be ‘very odd sculpture, the kind that once, if a child had done the like, I‘d have had a “Well – he’s got that out of his system!”’ (18 October 1953). Still, she accepted to an extent – even valued – both her sons’ distinctive qualities. ‘In rules of conduct and general behaviourism I see my teaching in my grown sons, but in wider ways they stand alone from me, with traits, strengths and achievements beyond and foreign to me’ (5 January 1950).

  *‘My husband had another very bad night’, Nella wrote the following day. ‘He has been remarkably free from very bad nightmares while Cliff has been at home’ (2 August.) This was a temporary respite, and she later expressed doubts that Cliff had a benign impact on his father.

  *Donald Campbell strove to set world records in his jet-powered speedboat Bluebird. It sank a few weeks later.

  *Gilbert Harding (1907–1960), a prominent radio and television personality, was noted for his brusque and cantankerous behaviour. Early in 1952 he came up in Nella’s conversation with acquaintances. ‘We talked of Gilbert Harding and his ill bred tantrums. I said, “I’m puzzled why the BBC put up with him. I’ve heard of many rudenesses. I think his boorishness is pathological rather than temperamental.” Someone said, “He was a beastly youth. I had occasion to meet him. His parents were Master and Matron of a workhouse, and the accepted idea was he had got his superiority complex from his youthful surroundings”’ (9 January 1952). ‘I wish I liked Gilbert Harding better’, she added on 21 August 1952. ‘If he isn’t rude and discourteous he is swarmy and unctuous and gives me the idea at times of being a bit fuddled.’

  *Citrus fruit was still scarce, and rosehips were a good source of vitamin C.