Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Significantly, Priestley’s returning serviceman had to do more than just raise his cultural game. ‘I think we make too much of our separateness in this country,’ the great man warned, and, after a dark reference to how the pre-war suburbs had been like ‘tree-lined concentration camps’, he went on: ‘Beware the charmed cosy circle. Don’t stay too long in that armchair . . . but get out and about, compel yourself to come to terms with strangers (who will not be strangers long), make one of a team or a group, be both worker and audience, and put a hand to the great tasks.’

  Was Priestley knocking at an open door? The testimony of Raphael Samuel – that most eclectic of historians, here recalling the years of his childhood – might easily make one think so:

  Organization was regarded as a good in itself; it was fetishized in the conduct of personal life quite as much as in the office or the factory; it extended to ‘dancing in step’ in the ballroom, to organized fun in the holiday camps, to the orderly queues at the football grounds and the orderly crowds on the terraces. The 1940s constituted, in Britain, a kind of zenith of mass society . . . In London there were no fringe theatres, except for ‘Unity’, our Communist theatre in St Pancras, no alternative food shops, except for some delicatessens in Swiss Cottage and a vegetarian grocer in Tottenham Court Road. Clothes were worn as an affirmation of social position rather than as a display of personal self, and they were regimented to a degree. Skirt lengths rose or fell uniformly, above or below the knee, according to the dictates of the season; a man who wore suede shoes was morally suspect.

  Those of us too young to remember the 1940s indeed look at the photographs of the massed ranks of cloth caps on the terraces, or the respectable-looking men wearing hats, jackets and ties as they watch the cricket or even sit by the sea, and assume that a uniform, collective appearance signified a uniform, collective spirit. Perhaps sometimes it did, but it was not a spirit inclined to forsake what Priestley, in his stridently communal ‘1945’ mood, lamented as ‘that famous English privacy’ responsible for ‘the apathetic herd we were in the Baldwin and Chamberlain era, when we messed about in our back gardens, ran about in our little cars, listened to the crooners and the comics, while the terrible shadows crept nearer’. Those shadows, after all, had now been banished, and for most people their reward was to return to their gardens and cars – cars that in time might even be a different colour than black.

  This was a truth that Frederic Osborn recognised. ‘In Welwyn, where everyone has a house and a garden, we find a moderate desire for social and communal life,’ he wrote to Lewis Mumford in August 1946 from his garden city. ‘The demand has definite limits; I am more communal in my habits than most people are. I find many women dislike the idea of nursery school and crêches; they want to look after their own children. And young men and women prefer lodgings to hostels.’ How, then, was a more communally minded society to be encouraged? With great difficulty. In their pioneering account of the Labour Party and popular politics in the 1940s, Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo chart the post-war development of such largely de haut en bas initiatives as neighbourhood units, socially mixed housing, municipal eating facilities, popular participation in urban planning and joint production committees in the workplace, with in each instance only chequered progress being made at best. In terms of voluntary organisations like Co-operative societies, friendly societies and community associations, all their evidence points towards an essentially ‘diviminded’, instrumental use of them (whether for benefits or facilities) on the part of members, as opposed to a more socialist or ideological motivation.7.

  Contemporary surveys flesh out the picture. In Willesden in the winter of 1946/7, more than twice as many preferred to live in a single-class street than in a mixed street; most drew a very careful distinction between ‘friends’, ‘acquaintances’ and ‘neighbours’; and 75 per cent of housewives were not on visiting terms with their neighbours, let alone going out together. Soon afterwards, a survey of Watling, an inter-war LCC estate near Edgware, found that only 30 per cent of adults answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Do you belong to any clubs, sports associations, guilds, etc., for leisure time activities, including those connected with politics and the social life of churches?’ – a figure apparently above the national trend. And in August 1947 an investigator in Bethnal Green heard explanations from working-class people about why they preferred to give a wide berth to clubs, societies and suchlike:

  I don’t like mixing, I like keeping myself to myself.

  I’m a married woman and I prefer staying in my home. I don’t want to go and mix with other people, I’ve too much to do in the house.

  I’ve got too much to do in the house, I’m glad to sit at home in the evening.

  No, I don’t want anything to do with that kind of thing. I just don’t like it that’s all.

  I’m just not interested I suppose, there’s plenty to do without joining one of those.

  Well I like going out with the hubby, and I don’t bother to mix much with others.

  I’ve got these three kiddies, they take up all my time.

  By now even Priestley was reluctantly coming to accept the sovereignty of the individual. ‘There seems to be far less kind and neighbourly co-operation than there was a few years ago, during the worst of the war years,’ he told his Light Programme listeners (presumably waiting impatiently for the next crooner) two months later. ‘People are harder, more selfish, more intent upon looking after Number One. They are more likely to snatch, grab, lose their temper.’ And, like a thousand intellectuals before and (especially) after him, he added, ‘Now why is this? What has gone wrong?’8.

  Over the years, the ‘“we wuz robbed!” tendency within British Labour historiography’, as the historian Dilwyn Porter has termed it, would exercise huge influence. If only there had been more systematic economic planning, if only there had been more extensive and full-blooded nationalisation, if only private education had been abolished – in fact, if only the Attlee government had been more socialist, and thereby engendered an irresistible moral and political force of popular enthusiasm for its policies – then the story of post-war Britain would have been fundamentally different and fundamentally happier. That was not how the New Statesman’s resident versifier, ‘Sagittarius’ (a pseudonym for Olga Katzin), saw things. In ‘Let Cowards Flinch,’ a brilliant long poem imitating Byron’s ottava rima and published in October 1947, she surveyed Labour’s first two years in power. Two verses had a special piquancy:

  But while they speed the pace of legislation

  With sleepless ardour and unmatched devotion,

  The lower strata of the population

  Appear to have imbibed a soothing potion;

  Faced with the mighty tasks of restoration

  The teeming millions seem devoid of motion,

  Indifferent to the bracing opportunity

  Of selfless service to the whole community.

  It is as if the Government were making

  Their maiden journey in the train of State,

  The streamlined engine built for record-breaking,

  Steaming regardless at a breakneck rate,

  Supposing all the while that they were taking

  Full complement of passengers and freight,

  But puffing on in solitary splendour,

  Uncoupled from the carriages and tender.

  Yet one can exaggerate the degree of uncoupling and indeed the breakneck steaming ahead. Precisely because the Attlee government was essentially practical and moderate in its approach, faithfully reflecting Attlee himself, it managed to create a settlement that in operational practice had – above all on the welfare side – considerable direct appeal. Crucially, it was an appeal not only to the working class, thankful (more or less) to consolidate its wartime gains, but also to significant elements of the middle class, who for all their lack of political gratitude were understandably reluctant to look an apparent gift horse, albeit a rather threadbare one, in the m
outh. People may not have been as communally minded as Priestley and Labour’s other cheerleaders might have wished, but they were for the most part perfectly willing, at this stage anyway, to look to collective provision in order to satisfy individual needs and wants. Put another way, the fact that BUPA started in 1947 did not mean that the majority of people were not welcoming the prospect of a national health service free at the point of delivery.

  Moreover, for many of those who had lived through the worst of the inter-war years – the bleak ‘Jarrow’ version of those years rather than Margaret Thatcher’s more upbeat ‘Grantham’ version – there was a deep satisfaction in the very fact of a government no longer run by the old gang. There might be serious economic problems, there might be miserable austerity, but at last the awful spectre of mass unemployment had seemingly been banished. One afternoon in April 1946, Florence Speed, an inveterate Conservative voter, was gazing at a shop window in Brixton:

  There were lovely fabrics on display & streamlined wooden carvings &furniture which doesn’t appeal to me.

  As I looked a friendly little man in a cap, but neat & respectable, said to me, ‘Beautiful stuff there’.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed slightly sardonically.

  ‘But it is good.’

  ‘Yes it is, but I like curves, not all these straight lines.’

  ‘I like Victorian mahogany,’ he said then. ‘More homely. But this stuff is good.’

  ‘British craftsmen are the best in the world – if they’d work.’

  ‘Digging that old one up’ the man retorted contemptuously, & in a few seconds the friendliness had changed to fanaticism as bottled up hate, poured out in a spate of sing song Welsh.

  He had been a miner . . . ‘Won’t work? I’d have walked from Land’s End to John o’Groats to get work. Every man’s entitled to a job. I’ve had nothing in a day but a cup of tea . . .’

  He had no teeth & spoke so vehemently, & rapidly, that he sprayed my face with spit.

  He told me of a friend who had fought in World War I . . . On his return he could find no work, & died from malnutrition. When he was dying he called his sons, & told them, ‘If there’s another war, don’t fight. I did & I’ve starved.’ Two of his sons were conscientious objectors in the last war.

  The Conservatives in a 100 years had done nothing but keep down 70% of the population & let them starve. There had been starvation in every town in the country. They would never be in office again. In fifty years time there would be no bloody dukes & no parasites. Everyone would have to work.

  A mild pleasant sociable old man, no one would have guessed at the deep-down burning hatred. The Labour Government are doing fine of course! – at least they haven’t had time yet . . .

  He had so obviously suffered that I couldn’t help sympathising with him.9.

  PART THREE

  8

  Christ It’s Bleeding Cold

  New Year’s Day 1947 was a red-letter day. ‘The MINES HAVE BEEN NATIONALISED TODAY,’ noted a somewhat sceptical Vere Hodgson in west London. ‘All is fun and games at the pits . . . The worst of it is these remedies for the troubles of life never turn out so well as you expect!’ Certainly that Wednesday and over the next few days there were some stirring scenes at Britain’s 970 pits, employing some 692,000 miners. The National Coal Board (NCB) flag was hoisted (often by the oldest employee at the colliery), speeches were made, songs were sung, banners were unfurled, brass bands played. They were all now ‘one family’, declared the NCB’s chairman Lord Hyndley at celebrations at Murton Colliery on the Durham coalfield, adding that ‘if they all worked hard and worked together they would make nationalisation a great success’. At nearby Thornley Colliery the main address was given by Hubert Tunney, former chairman of Thornley Miners’ Lodge and now assistant labour director of the coal board at Newcastle:

  Thirty years ago a lot of us saw in a far distance a dream of the public ownership of the mines. Now we have realised that ownership we have the important duty of making that venture a success. You are now privileged to work for a model employer. You have had holidays recently with pay and without conditions attached to them, the Board taking the view that there is a value in stressing and expressing the human side of the industry. The responsibility is now upon the management and the men to recognise that they must also play their part as far as production is concerned. Absenteeism must be reduced, lightning strikes must be cut out. There is no necessity for these things.

  Fine words, and at one Durham colliery they duly celebrated Vesting Day by burying a symbolic hatchet. But for Sid Chaplin, at the Dean and Chapter Colliery that dominated Ferryhill, it was a case of sitting in the canteen and hearing the sound of music in the distance, as lodge and colliery officials marched behind band and banner. ‘We had been working all night to install a new conveyer,’ he recalled. ‘It had been a long shift and we were tired. But the conveyer was ready for coal-work, and we were satisfied.’1.

  For a glimpse of the distinctive mentality and culture of the miners in the immediate post-war years, our best guide is the indefatigable Ferdynand Zweig, who travelled around the main English and Welsh coalfields between July and October 1947. ‘While talking to the miners,’ he found, ‘one is continually struck by the fact that the past is deeply ingrained in their minds’ – above all the 1926 coal strike. ‘Twenty years in the miner’s life,’ he added, ‘is probably like a year for others.’ Events between the wars had also led to a widely shared, deeply ingrained pessimism, which full employment and better wages since the early 1940s had done little to remove. ‘The great majority of miners are not politically minded,’ Zweig reckoned, ‘but all of them have an enormous – I would say an overwhelming – class consciousness.’ Outside working hours, miners’ favourite pastimes included watching games (especially football), going to the cinema, going dancing and gambling (dog and horse racing, football pools, sweepstakes). ‘In a village in West Yorkshire the people could name me nine bookies with their offices, and on racing days those places are simply besieged by the patrons, who want to know the latest results coming in on a teleprinter.’ As for reading habits, Zweig noted how ‘lately a great wave of cheap, rubbishy stories has invaded the mining villages, and at the stalls in any market you can see these booklets in exciting paper covers with glaring titles, changing hands like hot cakes . . . mostly second-hand, and very dirty.’ Dangerous Dames, Moonlight Desire, White Traffic, The Penalty is Death, Corpses Don’t Care, The League of the Living Dead: ‘glaring’ indeed.

  Inevitably, to Zweig’s silent but still palpable regret, ‘some welfare institutes and clubs have closed their reading and library rooms because they were not used and turned them into games rooms’, while ‘even in South Wales, where the traditions of cultural interests cultivated by the institution of “Eisteddfod” were very high, I was told that the choirs, dramatic societies, poetry and musical clubs are not as popular as they used to be.’ Zweig enquired why. “The buses have done that,” someone told him. “You can move freely for a few pence and get any amusement you want outside the village.” Zweig also went into miners’ homes, finding ‘a great contrast between the unpleasant appearance of the houses from outside and the nice appearance inside’:

  The rooms are kept very tidy and clean, and the housewives take immense pride in keeping their houses spotless. Most miners go to considerable pains to have a yearly re-decorating of their living-room, which is always larger than any of the others. The living-room is often furnished with a leather suite, including an armchair and a couch. In general, miners prefer brass fire-irons to wooden or other modern ones, and they still have very large fire-places of the metal type, with large set-pots. Another noticeable sight are the gaily decorated mantel-pieces, with brass and other ornaments. Hand-made rugs and carpets are the feature in nearly all mining houses . . .2

  For all the gambling and lurid paperbacks, for all the enhanced physical mobility, the pit villages were still deeply respectable, ultimately home-centred worlds of t
heir own.

  What at the start of 1947 did their inhabitants really expect from nationalisation? Clearly it was a moment not without high hopes. ‘Nationalisation appears as the final and the only all-embracing security,’ a Mass-Observation investigator had concluded in 1942 after lengthy stays in Blaina and Nantyglo on the South Wales coalfield; on Vesting Day itself that coalfield saw many scenes of excitement and enthusiasm, including more than a thousand miners gathering at Park Colliery to sing ‘Cwm Rhondda’. Yet did the rank and file, as opposed to some union leaders and activists, truly see nationalisation as ushering in, either actually or potentially, fundamental changes in working conditions and employer/employee relationships? Unfortunately, we have no contemporary surveys, ie at the point of nationalisation. But Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska’s 1980s interviews with a range of retired miners from four collieries (Oakdale, Park and Dare, Penrhiwceibr, Seven Sisters) in South Wales – significantly, a more radical coalfield than most – broadly confirm the low-key assessment that a South Yorkshire colliery manager had offered to James Lansdale Hodson some seven months before the event. The recollections she heard were of a solid but essentially narrow, pay-oriented trade unionism in these early post-war years. Bob Crockett ‘never took it into [his] head’ to go to union meetings, and ‘once I came out of that pit I came home and I never thought about the pit . . . until I had to go back there’; Cliff Price frankly conceded that he was ‘only interested in things appertaining to myself, my own work’; and according to Eddie Bevan, the men were solely interested in union affairs ‘when it hit their pockets, when something within the pit happens’. Few recalled the work itself with any fondness. ‘The worst occupation in God’s earth,’ declared Stanley Warnes; ‘as long as I was getting a wage at the end,’ was Bevan’s view; or, as Glan Powell put it, ‘wages, that’s what everybody is going down the pit for, to earn money’. Perhaps inevitably, such men tended to see the prospect of nationalisation as something which in itself did not particularly concern them. A ‘pie-in-the-sky sort of thing,’ remembered one, another that he ‘didn’t much think about it, to be honest’, a third that ‘[I]wasn’t really bothered myself.’ If it brought tangible, bread-and-butter benefits, well and good; if it did not, too bad; but either way, there were no ideological hopes invested.