Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Other oral evidence, from Midlands coalfields where there had been a long, pre-1947 history of harmonious industrial relations, predictably presents an even less politicised picture. Coventry Colliery, for example, was held up by one miner as having had ‘great sports grounds, great pavilions, they spent money on providing silver bands, a very good cricket team, parks, leisure, it’s all part of village life as I was brought up’. At the time of the changeover, his main hope was that benign paternalism under private ownership would continue under public ownership.3. Overall, a range of expectations and non-expectations obtained at the start of 1947, but few miners seemed to equate nationalisation with workers’ control, whatever that might mean.

  It was anyway a propitious moment for pragmatism rather than ideology, given that by the time of Vesting Day the government was in serious difficulties over the production of coal – responsible for more than 90 per cent of Britain’s energy requirements – and in no great position to resist the implementation of union demands for improved pay and conditions. The previous spring the National Union of Mine - workers had drawn up the ‘Miners’ Charter’, a broad-based wish list (including the modernisation of existing pits, the sinking of new ones, proper training for young miners, and improved social and welfare provision) that had at its core several key demands: average wages not to fall ‘below those of any other British industry’; a five-day week without loss of pay; and miners to receive two consecutive weeks’ paid holiday. Over the rest of 1946, the response of Manny Shinwell, Minister of Fuel and Power, was essentially to give way – over holidays, the principle of a guaranteed weekly wage and, above all, the five-day week, to come into operation by May 1947. In so doing he overrode the wishes of the fledgling NCB, though such was the parlous state of the industry that arguably he had little choice: not only was there a shortage of manpower (14,000 down on August 1945), but absenteeism rates were still high (running at about 15 per cent) and much-exhorted productivity improvements were barely coming through. Strikingly, the prospect of nationalisation – forced through by the government with what one historian has called ‘almost indecent haste’ – did as little to improve the situation in the closing months of 1946 as did Shinwell’s concessions to the Miners’ Charter, so that by the end of the year many factories in the Midlands and north-west were on short-time working because of the lack of coal.

  Shinwell himself, for all his bluff and bluster, was a disastrous minister at this difficult time. Hugh Gaitskell, who had drawn the short straw as his Parliamentary Secretary, would observe that ‘he walks alone one feels because he has never been able fully to trust anyone’, that his usual traits were ‘suspicion and aggression’, and that ‘as an administrator’ he was ‘hardly a starter’ – all fair charges. Working-class and left-wing, Shinwell felt an intense allegiance to the miners, who for so many years had enjoyed a unique position in the labour movement, and he obstinately believed that somehow they would see things through. ‘Prime Minister,’ he blithely remarked at one point to a sceptical Attlee, ‘you should not allow yourself to be led up the garden path by statistics. You should look at the imponderables.’4.

  On Thursday, 23 January 1947 – the day after Anthony Heap noted that ‘more and more shops and offices seem to be going in for the new pale blue “fluorescent” system of electric lighting’ – snow began to fall in the south-east. It was the start of Britain’s most severe and protracted spell of bad weather during the twentieth century. Florence Speed was one of millions who shivered:

  24 January. I was frozen today, gas is on at such low pressure. Worked with scarf over my head, mittens on my hands, & a rug round my legs.

  25 January. Open spaces look as if sugar has been dredged over them.

  28 January. Freeze up continues . . . Thermometer been at freezing point all day. Waste pipe in the bathroom & the geyser frozen.

  29 January. Even colder the forecast for tonight, so I’ve borrowed a balaclava helmet from Fred [her brother] to wear in bed!

  30 January. The cuts last night put lights out in the streets. Hyde Park was closed because there were no lights there.

  On Sunday the 26th, as the big freeze started to tighten its grip, the annual meeting was held of Oakdale Navigation Lodge, the miners’ lodge for Oakdale Colliery in South Wales. ‘It was regrettable to hear over the Wireless that Factories were closing down for lack of coal,’ remarked the chairman, Sam Garland. ‘This was not the fault of the Miners.’ Was the importation of Polish miners the answer? Not according to Garland: ‘We are in dire need of coal and previously it had been Miners’ sons that had filled the pits, changes had come and Miners’ sons were looking for a larger life, there were other people’s sons who could well do their share before the introduction of foreign labour.’ Three days later, the coldest day for more than 50 years, the lights went out not only in London but all over the country; the electricity was off for long spells; gas in most big cities was at about a quarter of its normal pressure; and amid huge snow-drifts transport virtually ground to a halt. ‘Wearing my snow boots and fur-lined coat I was not once warm,’ grumbled James Lees-Milne. ‘All my pipes, including w.c. pipes, are frozen, so a bath or a wash is out of the question. W.c. at the office frozen likewise . . . And we live in the twentieth century. Even the basic elements of civilization are denied us.’5.

  A visitor to London at this miserable time was Christopher Isherwood, over from America for the first time since before the war. Londoners themselves ‘didn’t seem depressed or sullen’ – though ‘their faces were still wartime faces, lined and tired’, while ‘many of them stared longingly at my new overcoat’ – and his only criticism of the prevailing stoicism was that ‘perhaps the English had become a little too docile in their attitude toward official regulation’. By contrast, he found London’s physical shabbiness ‘powerfully and continuously depressing’:

  Plaster was peeling from even the most fashionable squares and crescents; hardly a building was freshly painted. In the Reform Club, the wallpaper was hanging down in tatters. The walls of the National Gallery showed big unfaded rectangles, where pictures had been removed and not yet rehung. Many once stylish restaurants were now reduced to drabness and even squalor . . . London remembered the past and was ashamed of its present appearance. Several Londoners I talked to at that time believed it would never recover. ‘This is a dying city,’ one of them told me.

  As for the snow, ‘it soon assumed the aspect of an invading enemy’:

  Soldiers turned out to fight it with flame-throwers. The newspapers spoke of it in quasi-military language: ‘Scotland Isolated’, ‘England Cut in Half’. Even portions of London were captured; there was a night when no taxi driver would take you north of Regent’s Park. With coal strictly rationed, gas reduced to a blue ghost and electricity often cut off altogether, everybody in England was shivering. I remember how the actors played to nearly empty houses, heroically stripped down to their indoor clothes, while we their audience huddled together in a tight clump, muffled to the chins in overcoats, sweaters and scarves. I remember a chic lunch party composed of the intellectual beau monde, at which an animated discussion of existentialism was interrupted by one of the guests exclaiming piteously: ‘Oh, I’m so cold!’ Two or three of my friends said to me then: ‘Believe us, this is worse than the war!’ By which I understood them to mean that the situation couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be viewed as a challenge to self-sacrifice or an inspiration to patriotism; it was merely hell.

  Such were Isherwood’s recollections, published some nine years later, with only a passing reference to English supineness in the face of official dom. Yet at the time, his visit made a considerable impact upon his friends and acquaintances. ‘We realised we had become shabby and rather careless of appearances in our battered surroundings,’ recalled his host, the writer and editor John Lehmann. ‘That we had become crushed as civilians to accept the ordering about of officialdom. That we had become obsessively queue-forming, and were priggishly pro
ud of it.’ Such feelings, induced by Isherwood’s ‘sharp observation of the altered London’, were heightened by the ghastly winter:

  The adrenaline [ie of war] was no longer being pumped into our veins. We endured with misery and loathing the continual fuel cuts, the rooms private and public in which we shivered in our exhausted overcoats, while the snow blizzards swept through the country again and yet again. Were there to be no fruits of victory? The rationing cards and coupons that still had to be presented for almost everything from eggs to minute pieces of scraggy Argentine meat, from petrol to bed-linen and ‘economy’ suits, seemed far more squalid and unjust than during the war . . .

  Worse, still, to my increasingly disillusioned eye, was the kind of mean puritanism that the newly triumphant Labour MPs and their officials appeared to have decided was the proper wear of the day. Too many of them seemed to think there was a virtue in austerity and shabbiness, in controls and restrictions . . .

  It was a significant alienation. The metropolitan intelligentsia had mainly welcomed the 1945 election result, but the socialism of daily privation and daily restrictions was not their kind of socialism. Moreover, it was symptomatic, not least in their eyes, that a magazine like Penguin New Writing (edited by Lehmann himself) was by this time on a sharply downward spiral in its circulation, having hit a peak of 100,000 in the spring of 1946. This dispiriting trend, Lehmann explained, meant the end of the fond hope, shared by the publisher Allen Lane (founder of Penguin paperbacks), that ‘given the right formula an enormous public was now ready to devour what would have been considered almost entirely highbrow fare before the war’.6.

  There was nothing highbrow about the Levenshulme Palais, where Frank Lewis – still working in Manchester, having failed most of his economics exams the previous summer at the University College of South Wales in Cardiff – went on the evening of Monday, 3 February:

  2 dances with ‘Port Madoc’; she’s nice; I’d like to go out with her. (‘Wouldn’t I with any of them,’ repeats a dark hidden voice.) She told me her nickname was ‘Smiler’. She showed me running steps during the last quickstep at 10 to 11.

  I dance with ‘Blondex’. Boy, what legs?

  I dance with ‘Belle Vue’, who also taught me running steps.

  There was heavy snow that day in the north and Midlands, but Lewis seems to have been too preoccupied to notice. Not so an anxious Mary King in her Birmingham suburb. ‘Tonight 17,000 employees will be idle at the Longbridge Austin Motor Works through lack of fuel,’ she recorded that evening. ‘Many other firms are in the same plight. It is a dreadful thing to face.’ Two days later, in the context of a weather forecast of ‘more snow, & wintry conditions to continue’, her anxiety deepened: ‘One thinks of the shortage of fuel, and home comforts, such as blankets & sheets, & carpets – the scarcity of food – the difficulty of transport, and the unemployment of thousands of workers in factories due to lack of coal & materials. Never in my lifetime have I known such a period of history . . .’

  Finally, on Friday the 7th – the day after Ellen Wilkinson’s death (possibly suicide), barely a week since she had told an audience at the Old Vic that she wanted Britain to be a Third Programme nation – Shinwell and his colleagues acted. With sufficient supplies of coal failing to reach power stations in London, the Midlands and the north-west, he announced that from the following Monday not only would electricity supplies to industry in these regions be suspended, but householders there would have to make do without electricity daily for three hours from 9 a.m. and two hours from 2 p.m.

  ‘Somebody has been short sighted somewhere, sometime,’ was Mary King’s immediate reaction, and over the weekend much wrath, public and private, was directed at the hapless Shinwell. Repudiating his attempt to blame the weather (‘Let the Minister look to himself’), and reckoning that ‘never since the Industrial Revolution have we seen a crisis come in this way’, the Financial Times declared that the situation was ‘as serious a threat to prosperity, in peace time, as the events which brought down Mr Neville Chamberlain’s Government were to victory in war time’. The staunchly pro-Tory Glasgow pattern-maker Colin Ferguson castigated Shinwell’s ‘crass ignorance’ and saw the crisis as conclusive evidence that the government was ‘the silliest set of sneering gas-bags we’ve ever been cursed with in this country’; the reasonably objective James Lansdale Hodson, after noting ‘drifts fifteen feet deep in Northumberland, railways in parts impassable, and queues of professional women in St John’s Wood with buckets at a water-tap in the road’, called Shinwell ‘a modern phenomenon – muddling, insouciant, and a yoke round our suffering necks’. Even Vere Hodgson, not unsympathetic to the aspirations of the Labour government, accepted that ‘we are in an awful MESS’, could not understand why Shinwell had not resigned and asserted that ‘there is not a leader amongst them’. On Sunday afternoon it did start to thaw in London. But on Monday, to mark the new restrictions, ‘it froze again very hard, so that,’ in Lees-Milne’s words, ‘the slush is like slippery brick’.7.

  The next 12 days or so, through to about 22 February, were the height of the crisis, with the weather unremittingly grim and unemployment rising to more than 1.75 million (compared to just over 400,000 in mid-January). Government-imposed restrictions were intensified: no electricity for five hours a day across the nation’s households; television, the Third Programme and many magazines suspended; major cuts in transmission times for the Home and the Light programmes; newspapers even more severely cut down in size than before because of newsprint rationing; most forms of external lighting forbidden; and no electricity to be used in relation to superfluous activities like greyhound racing. There was also an intense propaganda campaign urging the public to use, when it could use, as little electricity and gas as possible. Inevitably, the miners in these weeks came under acute pressure to raise their levels of production. By and large they seem to have responded, with output per man-shift being as high during February as at any point over the previous 12 months, though such weather-induced problems as inaccessible mines, frozen-solid pithead stockpiles and transportation difficulties once the coal was ready to leave the colliery could not but affect overall production. On Sunday the 16th, ‘Coal Sunday’, many miners in the South Wales coalfield voluntarily worked a full shift, winning widespread praise for the ‘Dunkirk spirit’.

  Could more be done? Sydney T. Jones of Pengam Road, Penpedairheol, Hengoed, Glamorgan, was probably motivated by public interest as well as self-interest when the previous week he took his case direct to ‘Mr Shinwell’:

  I hope you will forgive me for writing to you at this critical time, but it is a matter of the utmost importance in as much as it concerns the very problem with which you are grappling now – the Fuel Shortage.

  I am a South Wales miner, and I write to ask – not only for myself – but for several of my butties, that you use your good influence with the Ministry of Transport to get him to restore to us miners the Travel Priority on our local Bus Services, especially those of us who work on the afternoon shifts. I myself, having been home two weeks with flu and bronchitis through having to walk half a mile to the nearest bus stop from the colliery, and waiting about at the end of the queue for the last bus to our village, a mile and a half away, we find at 10.30 p.m. the queue is made up of half-drunks, picturegoers, dance hall riff-raff, and we who have been sweating our guts out at the coal face are left to shiver in the bitter cold wind and hear the bus conductor say – ‘Sorry, only three or four’ as the case may be. Those types of pub crawlers can get home, but we miners have to walk through the torrents of rain or snow storms across the fields over the mountains to get home about 11.30 p.m., or near mid-night, and then perhaps we have to return in the morning to perform some special job. That means getting up at 4 a.m. to catch the Workers Factory Bus at 5.15 a.m. from the village. So you will see Sir how important it is. Tons and tons of coal is being lost to the nation through miners going to work at (1 p.m.) lunchtime for the afternoon shift and unable to get on
the crowded buses through the Priority Ruling having been removed. As you are no doubt aware there are no Collieries, at least, very few are in big towns, and in the Rhymney valley especially miners have to travel miles on buses. So please do your very best to get us to work, and get us home at the end of the afternoon shift. For the day shift it matters not so much; because there are plenty of buses if they miss one. But at 10.30 p.m. at night the last bus from town means everything to us who work on this shift.