Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  A most disturbing feature of it is the number of crimes with violence. In an effort to keep the thing within bounds the police have taken to large-scale raids on the public. Without warning they cordon-off a large area and make everyone produce his identity card [introduced during the war]. They take anyone who cannot satisfactorily account for himself to the police station for further enquiries. The first of these raids took place in the West End this last week. Many deserters were picked up and many clues found to gangs of robbers responsible for recent crimes. But it adds a new terror to pleasure-seeking in the West End . . .

  It was also reported that one butcher in the pre-Christmas period, having managed by hook or by crook to obtain some turkeys, slept in his shop with a loaded revolver.

  The crime wave, especially in the form of burglaries, did not abate in 1946; Panter-Downes that spring spoke for upper-middle if not middle England when she lamented the fact that ‘practically nobody has a servant to leave on guard in the kitchen’. She then related the story of how a Chelsea householder had recently come home from the cinema one evening only to find that burglars had visited for the third time and taken his last overcoat, some tinned sardines, a pound of tea and two pots of marmalade. ‘These are things,’ she hardly needed to add, ‘which are painful and grievous to lose nowadays.’ The figures are patchy, but it seems that an appreciably higher proportion than usual of these burglaries were committed by juveniles – a fact that subsequent police reports not implausibly attributed to the way in which ‘during the war years children have lacked fatherly control and restraint and in a large number of families mothers have obviously tended to allow too much freedom’.16What was indisputable was that a moral panic was brewing up nicely.

  Reassuringly, during the spring and disappointingly poor summer, the old sporting rituals reappeared, apparently unscathed: not only the Cup Final but the Boat Race (‘the Prime Minister was there, the swans were out, young men back from the services wore beards, folk picnicked on roofs, ate ice-cream, let off crackers,’ noted Hodson), the Grand National (Captain Petre, on leave from the Scots Guards, winning on Lovely Cottage, very much the housewives’ choice) and Wimbledon (the British players routed by the French, American and Australian ones). Then there was that traditional highlight of the social calendar, the Eton versus Harrow match at Lord’s. ‘There were only five tents in the usually close-packed stretch of turf,’ reported Panter-Downes, ‘and . . . the men looked an extremely shabby bunch. As a parade of the upper crust, valiantly pretending that everything was still the same, the occasion was a little saddening.’

  Still, the cricket authorities made a fair show in this first peacetime season of pretending that nothing had changed. Although professionals were at last given their initials on the scorecards at Lord’s, they were carefully put after the surname, with the initials for amateurs continuing to precede the surname; while the two classes of cricketer continued for the most part, though no longer invariably, to change in separate dressing rooms. Moreover, of the 17 first-class counties, only one was captained by a professional, Les Berry of Leicestershire. ‘There has probably never been a better collection than those who have been appointed for this year,’ the Daily Telegraph’s new cricket correspondent, E. W. Swanton, declared reassuringly on the season’s eve. ‘Better in the sense,’ he explained, ‘of having a truer notion of the essentials of a cricket match, of whatever kind.’ Perhaps so, but the year’s crop included not only at least three non-bowling amateurs who by no chari-table stretch of the imagination were worth their places as batsmen but also Surrey’s Nigel Bennett, an undistinguished club cricketer who got the job only through a case of mistaken identity. ‘Want of knowledge of county cricket on the field presented an unconquerable hindrance to the satisfactory accomplishment of arduous duties’ was the mild but telling verdict on him of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, no friend of the open society.

  Large crowds watched the run-stealers flicker to and fro. As usual, the final test (against India) was at The Oval, and on the first day ‘rain that fell until one o’clock so affected the ground that it was doubtful if play would have been attempted even at five o’clock but for the crowds of people who waited around the walls from early in the morning’. Elsewhere, the wet summer did not hinder the pursuit of the poor man’s opera – March 1947 would prove to be the peak of the post-war Bulge – and indeed 1946 set a new record for venereal infections. There was also the dream of the first proper summer holiday for at least seven years, but for many it remained a dream. In Coventry, when the factories closed in late July, the local paper described ‘thousands of people, walking aimlessly through the streets or standing in queues for buses to take them a few miles away for a change from the every-day’. A 60-year-old working-class man, outlining his holiday plans to Mass-Observation at the start of August, was more enterprising or perhaps fortunate: ‘We tried everywhere but we couldn’t get in – they’re so packed. People have booked up months ago, they’re all full up. So in the end I told the wife to write to a place we stayed in Margate . . . We’re very fond of Margate, it’s lively and the air’s good and we’re going to make day trips to Ramsgate and elsewhere. It’ll be a change.’ For a 30-year-old more middle-class woman, waiting for her husband to be demobbed, common sense vied with natural yearnings:

  Well, we’re going up North to Glasgow. We’ve gone up there every year for the simple reason it’s cheapest and Mum and Dad are always glad to see us, and what with this rationing business and now the bread, well, it’s too much bother going anywhere else. Besides think of the money it would cost to have a seaside holiday . . . Oh, but I’d give anything to give Johnny a real holiday – one where he could make sand-pies on the beach. He’s never been to the seaside . . .

  The Friday before the August Bank Holiday weekend (still then at the start of the month) saw huge queues for trains out of London, and at Paddington the railway officials for once relented and put up a notice: ‘All platform tickets suspended’.17

  The generally downbeat summer mood was epitomised by the lack of popular enthusiasm ahead of the full-scale Victory Parade in London on Saturday, 8 June. ‘Are you going to put out your decorations?’ Florence Speed asked a Brixton neighbour on the Thursday. ‘No, things are worse,’ was the gloomy reply. The same day a couple of Nottingham working-class women gave their reactions. ‘I don’t know what they want to have another V Day Parade so long after the war [for],’ one said. ‘People have had enough of it.’ The other was even more negative: ‘I don’t agree with it at all. We haven’t got much to celebrate about. The food is bad, the young fellows are still in the Forces – what will those women who have lost their sons in the war think?’ On Friday afternoon, joining a queue of about 30 outside a baker’s shop in London, a Mass-Observation investigator found the grumbling positively savage. ‘“I’ve been queuing ever since eight o’clock this morning, what with one thing and another,” says F40D. “I’m about done for. I’d like to take that Attlee and all the rest of them and put them on top of a bonfire in Hyde Park and BURN them.” “And I’d ’elp yer,” says F65D. “Same ’ere,” say several other angry women.’

  On the day itself, marred by rain, some six million (by one estimate) assembled to watch the parade. ‘The crowds were huge, Joyce, but really huge,’ the well-bred journalist Virginia Graham assured her friend Joyce Grenfell soon afterwards. ‘Most of the people had slept in the streets all night, & been rained upon, but there they were, paper caps & all, fainting like flies, cheering every horse or dog or policeman, as merry as grigs.’ Certainly there was pride among the spectators and the many other millions who listened to it on the radio – the latter including Marian Raynham in Surbiton, who wondered ‘what other country can make up such a varied performance’ and marvelled at ‘what organisation to do it’ – but for the most part grig-like they were not. A note the following Tuesday by Mass-Observation’s invaluable Chelsea-based investigator makes this clear:

  Almost everybody Inv met on the 10t
h and 11th, whether friends or tradespeople or strangers in shops, were saying loudly how utterly exhausted and washed-out they felt, not only those who had gone to see the procession but those who had stayed at home and merely heard it over the wireless. The remark incessantly repeated, both on Victory Day and afterwards, was: ‘Well, it’s the last of its kind – I don’t suppose we shall ever see another’. Sometimes this was followed by ‘The next war’ll be short and sweet,’ or ‘We just won’t be there at the finish, next time’.

  One or two women did remark that there was still Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to look forward to – but that ‘it wouldn’t be the same because there wouldn’t be the troops’.18

  The Victory Parade had – for relatively few, relatively well-off people – a side benefit. ‘Remember me?’ asked the announcer Jasmine Bligh on Friday the 7th, as BBC television began post-war broadcasting by showing the same Mickey Mouse cartoon that had been on the small screen when television had ceased in September 1939. That same day, the opening Variety Party featured Peter Waring, star of radio’s Variety Bandbox. ‘I must say, I feel a trifle self-conscious going into the lens of this thing,’ ran his rather arch patter. ‘But since I’m here I might just as well tell you a little about myself and my hobbies. I have one or two hobbies you know that Sir Stafford [Cripps, the famously austere Labour minister] can’t control. No, I thought that now I’m being televised, you might see the jokes quicker.’ Next day, Freddie Grisewood was the main television commentator on the parade, with Richard Dimbleby (who had made his name describing the liberation of Belsen) as second string. ‘You will forgive a man for saying that it is only a hat with feathers on it’ was his surprisingly flip comment on Princess Elizabeth’s elaborate headgear.19At this stage there existed only some 20,000 television sets (all pre-war), mainly within 30 miles of Alexandra Palace (from where programmes were transmitted), and as yet not many were inclined to take the new medium seriously as a force for the future.

  The muted response to the Victory Parade was the first of three key symbolic events during the summer of 1946. The second was the imposition of bread rationing, announced four weeks in advance on 27 June by the new Minister of Food, the highly cerebral John Strachey. The generally negative reaction, especially on the part of women, was epitomised by a letter to her local paper immediately afterwards by E. Harris of 97 Cedars Avenue, Coventry:

  I am a housewife, and I wish to protest against this last burden which is to be put upon us. We have stood everything else, but this is the last straw. I have two menfolk. I cut up one large loaf every morning for packing, and my son can eat the best part of another for breakfast. How do they think we can live on the ration they are going to give us? Are we housewives to starve ourselves still more to give to those who go to earn our living for us? We give up most of our food to them now, and many of us are at breaking-point.

  Over the next few weeks, much of the public protest was channelled through the Housewives’ League, a largely middle-class organisation, which by mid-July had presented two petitions (one to the House of Commons, the other to the Ministry of Food), each with some 300,000 signatories. Judy Haines was probably not one of them. With the scheme due to start on Monday the 22nd, her approach was typically robust:

  19 July. How bakers are quibbling over bread rationing. I think Strachey is very patient with ’em. First they think it unnecessary (who should know?!), then they want it postponed! As if the Govt. are doing it for fun! I welcome it. Probably see more cakes, and the ration is generous anyway. People will just be more bread conscious.

  20 July. Housewives go ‘bread crazy’. Shortages or queues everywhere. As if it will keep! Unfortunately I had my hair to rinse and set. Then tried Chingford, Walthamstow and Leyton for bread. Mum was able to buy rolls at Mrs Negus’s and let me have half a loaf, which will do beautifully.

  She was right. The amount of bread available on the Monday proved more than adequate; while as Grace Golden, a London-based commercial artist, perceptively put it in her diary, ‘significant to see the patient tired faces of people queuing at Food Office, most of us too tired &apathetic to resist any stricture’.

  Nevertheless, over the next few days not only did bread supplies often run out with dismaying speed, but there was the harrowing, widely publicised story of a girl of 19 who, fearful of a fine if she put six slices of bread in a bin, tried to burn them by pouring petrol over them and in the process burned herself to death. ‘How do you feel about bread rationing?’ Mass-Observation asked some working-class women in Kilburn and Finsbury Park in mid-August. One of the main reasons for the government’s action had been to bring pressure on the Americans to do more to feed Germany, but the replies were unremittingly narrow in focus:

  It’s been good for us, we’ve got more points as a result.

  Disgusting. If anything it’s making people more discontented.

  I’m well pleased with it. I haven’t used all my bread units and so I get extra points.

  Well, I think it’s stopped a lot of waste.

  It’s a damned nuisance more than anything.20

  Even if the bread ration was adequate, as most acknowledged it was, the very fact of peacetime bread rationing would remain a symbolic sore as long as it remained in force. This was especially so on the part of the middle class, and it was a straw in the wind when in a clutch of by-elections in July, two working-class Labour seats were held with only a small swing to the Tories, but in suburban, middle-A class Bexley, captured by Labour in 1945, an 11 per cent swing to the Tories almost cost Labour the seat.

  Of course, everyone apart from spivs and their suppliers became to a greater or lesser degree fed up with the inescapable reality of continuing rationing, shortages and all the rest of it. But broadly speaking, it does seem that the middle class lost patience more quickly and more conclusively than the rest. Clues lie in Florence Speed’s Brixton diary entry about the baker’s the day before the Victory Parade:

  Mrs Randall when Mabel [probably a friend or neighbour of Speed] went in for the bread about 10.30 said ‘Sold out, & no more today’.

  Mabel replied ‘Well I do think you might save a loaf for regular customers’.

  Mrs R. flared up & retorted, ‘Don’t you talk to me like that’ . . .

  Mrs R. looked sick when Ethel [Speed’s sister] went & paid the bill & said she wanted no more.

  ‘I think you’ve treated me badly!’ she told us. Treated her!!

  We’ve dealt at no other shop for 35 years despite change of ownership, & as Ethel said, ‘It’s like begging for your bread. We’ve never had to do that.’

  A week later, forsaking Brixton, the two sisters observed the black market in something like close-up:

  While queuing in Regent Street, we watched a hawker with a barrow amply laden with peaches at 1/6d. In about 20 minutes he sold 25/6d worth. A boy with a whip, from a van, not more than 14 or 15, bought two & promptly ate them crossing the road back to his van. It is the most unlikely people who have the money! . . .

  Peaches imported from France are very plentiful, but much too costly for most people.

  Gladys Langford was similarly struggling to hold her own in what felt like an increasingly alien, unfriendly world. On a Monday in August, mercifully on holiday from her miserable schoolteaching, she spent a day in the West End:

  In D.H. Evans hordes of highly perfumed and under-washed women thronged the departments. Assistants ignored my presence – the only one I questioned announced she was not a saleswoman – so I walked out . . . No queues for ice-wafers and cornets since typhoid has been traced to ice-cream. By Piccadilly Tube Station – outside the Pavilion – a woman about my age was playing a piano-accordion. She was plastered with rouge and powder, wore a smart black costume and black peaked cap and a scarlet scarf was knotted about her neck. Another woman, also a beggar, one-legged and grimy, sat slicing a large peach!

  Then came the poignant pay-off: ‘I cannot afford anything more toothsome than plums at 4½d lb.’21r />
  Two contrasting novels explored the middle-class predicament during these attritional times. One Fine Day (1947) by Mollie Panter-Downes was written during the spring and early summer of 1946 and set contemporaneously in a quiet part of the Surrey countryside. Laura and Stephen are learning to make do without domestic servants, a sympathetically depicted struggle in difficult circumstances, and contemplate selling up and moving somewhere smaller and more manageable. Revelation comes to the husband, the inevitable ‘something in the City’, in the penultimate chapter:

  No, damnit, he thought, let’s hold on a little longer and see if things improve. And it suddenly struck him as preposterous how dependent he and his class had been on the anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and worked the strings. All his life he had expected to find doors opened if he rang, to wake up to the soft rattle of curtain rings being drawn back, to find the fires bright and the coffee smoking hot every morning as though household spirits had been working while he slept. And now the strings had been dropped, they all lay helpless as abandoned marionettes with nobody to twitch them.