Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Contemporary observers made much of the miners’ deep sense of social inferiority, arising out of their bitter, humiliating experiences between the wars; Zweig in his study asserted that this ‘inferiority complex’ was ‘especially strong in South Wales’.8. If anything, this plea to Shinwell would suggest that things were changing. But in any case, it is undeniably the authentic miner’s voice – one obscure, now-forgotten Jones among many obscure, now-forgotten Joneses – and one is grateful it survives.

  Few people enjoyed these mid-February days and nights. At Oxford, where the editor of Cherwell had just been sacked for publishing a questionnaire that asked female undergraduates if they were still virgins, ‘CHRIST ITS BLEEDING COLD’ was how the very male (and army-coarsened?) undergraduate Kingsley Amis put it to his friend Philip Larkin. ‘Life here is quite impossible,’ Evelyn Baring of the merchant bank Barings, probably the most august house in the City of London, reported to a fellow-banker, ‘and really no-one would have believed it if they had read it in a novel. From 9 to 12 and 2 to 4 we work in the dim glow of candlelight or nightlight.’ The diarists, meanwhile, shivered like the rest:

  10 February (Monday). We walked down Baker St & Oxford St. The sky was heavy, the day grey & dark but the stores inside were gloomier still . . . Assistants were straining their eyes trying to write out bills, the darkness was depressing. Coming out onto the streets again the dull light was almost dazzling. (Florence Speed)

  11 February. Go out shopping – much windier & colder – astonishing to see Woolworths, like every other shop, lit by odd gas lamps &candles by cash registers. At 2 pm – sudden plunging into gloom. (Grace Golden)

  12 February. Tonight it is announced that the cuts are to be extended throughout the whole country, Scotland & Wales . . . Also that we are to return to a ‘black-out’ on the streets. Traffic lights will remain . . . Yet for all the seriousness of the Country’s situation, Ethel & I saw crowds – women chiefly! – mob Laurel & Hardy outside The Monseigneur [cinema] at Trafalgar Square this afternoon, to get their autographs . . . Hardy – the fat one – is revolting. Huge & grotesque . . . Both were hugely delighted at their reception; only moved on when the Policeman said ‘Enough’. (Florence Speed)

  13 February. No soap to be bought anywhere, & I feel ready to drop with fatigue by 2 pm. Lily sent me 2 lbs potatoes through the post & I am saving them for Sunday’s dinner . . . Last night I went to the Red House to play cards in my fur coat & turban it was so cold there. (Rose Uttin)

  Penalty now for using current during restricted times, the situation being ‘dangerously critical’, is a fine of £100 or three months jail . . . Yet despite this a woman in a queue in Brixton declared defiantly, ‘Well anyway, I’m going to switch on the iron & do my ironing as soon as I get home’. It’s because so many haven’t played fair – the worst offenders are shopkeepers it is reported – that the penalties have been imposed. (Florence Speed)

  Gas fire very low, but Ione [her baby daughter] and I managed. Shortage of pennies and shillings announced! . . . Down to last nappy but managed to get more dry between 12 and 2 and after 4. We froze up again. (Judy Haines) 14 February. Long queues for potatoes . . . Reduced clothing coupon

  14 allowances. No wonder people steal coupons and clothes . . . Blackout so batteries for torches are scarce. (Gladys Langford)

  16 February. Restrictions and arctic conditions persist . . . Several people here ignore lighting regulations and use lamps & radios at forbidden hours. (Gladys Langford)

  18 February. Yesterday Selfridge’s was packed as though there was a bargain sale there. ‘Nothing else to do, nowhere to go,’ we heard a man say, obviously one of the nearly 3½ millions stood off through the fuel crisis. Today we saw men carrying their wives’ shopping baskets. (Florence Speed)

  19 February. In addition to my usual winter apparel, am now wearing four woollen pullovers (three sleeveless ones under my waistcoat, one with sleeves over it). And yet I still get chilled to the bone sitting in that bleak, unheated office all day. (Anthony Heap)

  22 February. The weather is atrocious and now gas supplies are threatened. The streets are seas of slush and to cross a wide road means flirting with death. (Gladys Langford)

  But for Frank Lewis, at the Great Universal Stores warehouse in Manchester, the weather still failed to impinge. ‘Getting bloody boring at work, on the bloody shoot [ie chute],’ he noted on the 14th. ‘If only, too, the British working man didn’t do so much bloody grumbling.’ And the following Wednesday he went to a ‘rag dance’ at the Plaza: ‘Bloody awful! Too hot. Terrible women . . . I’ll have to take “stronger love measures” to get a girl. I can’t go on like this. This sex business is positively getting me down.’9.

  What were other reactions at the height of the fuel crisis and accompanying cuts? Mass-Observation sounded out, between the 10th and 14th, various working-class Londoners:

  I think it’s ridiculous for the Royal family to go on such an expensive tour [they had left for South Africa on the 1st] – it should have been put off – the country can’t afford it.

  Shocking – the position is absolutely shocking. The country is deteriorating rapidly. Thank Goodness I had nothing to do with voting Labour in. They’re not the right kind to be at the head of affairs. What with one thing and another life’s very trying. And the food – there isn’t enough fats to keep oneself fit in this sort of weather. The diet is much too starchy. Oh, I could go on by the hour but what’s the good.

  Rotten isn’t it? Can’t be helped though, wouldn’t be done unless there was any real need for it. I’m sure everybody is doing their best.

  Shinwell? Ha! ha! ha! Don’t know much about him, suppose he’s doing his best.

  They should have warned us that the position was bad. Same as old Churchill did even in the blackest days. Came on the wireless and let us know how we stood, and even if the news wasn’t good he somehow gave us confidence. But old Attlee doesn’t do that.

  It’s very bad in our line – the tailoring trade. When we’re working on black we’re practically working in the dark.

  A coalman in Croydon spoke with particular personal experience. ‘It’s like everything else, the people with a lot of money get all they want,’ he explained. ‘I delivered half a ton this morning to a house in Purley, their fair ration mind you, but they’ve already got a stock of about a ton and a half and a couple of tons of coke besides. Now you can’t get any coke, but those fellers can, they’ve got the money see.’

  In general, in terms of obeying the restrictions on the use of power – restrictions to some extent based on voluntary compliance – it is clear enough that, as Florence Speed among others complained, not everyone played the game. Nevertheless, in the weeks beginning on 10 and 17 February there were rates of saving of respectively 29 and 28 per cent, ie by comparison with the level of coal consumption immediately before the cuts. Such figures, according to the authoritative history of the fuel crisis, ‘attested to the public’s willing co-operation with official attempts at enforcement’.10This did not necessarily mean, though, that they co-operated with a song in their hearts.

  For one child this winter the big freeze was a mixed blessing, for another it was an unmitigated disaster. Roy Hattersley, growing up in a Sheffield suburb, went sledging after school every day – ‘tearing downhill on home-made toboggans as we used the public highways as our Cresta Run’, for at that time ‘there were few motor-cars in Wadsley’. But at night he would leap into bed, still with the socks on that had protected him from ‘the freezing linoleum’, and huddle under an ‘immense weight of sheet, thread-bare blankets, home-made eiderdown and coats carried up from the wardrobe at the bottom of the stairs’. For Bill Wyman (then Bill Perks), growing up in Penge, the atrocious weather meant that his bricklayer father was laid off work and no money came in. ‘There wasn’t enough food to go round, so he’d hit a couple of us, send us to bed without any dinner,’ one of Bill’s brothers recalled. ‘“Get to bed, don’t argue!” Then you�
�d get hit, kicked up the stairs – vroom, that was it . . . And in the house we lived in, you didn’t want to go to bed. It was freezing cold, really nasty, with ice on the inside of the windows and bedbugs that drove us crazy.’

  But for two adults these uncongenial weeks proved the great turning point in their lives. Dirk Bogarde was among the cast (along with other unknowns Kenneth More and Dandy Nicholls) in a new play, Power Without Glory, about a working-class London family that opened in late February at a theatre club in Notting Hill Gate. Bogarde, only recently demobbed, played the male lead, Cliff, a neurotic who kills a girl in a crime passionnel. The play got rave reviews, with particular praise for Bogarde (‘an excellent casual murderer, all egotism and nerves’), and within weeks he had signed a seven-year film contract with Rank. Meanwhile, Elizabeth David found herself stuck in a hotel in Ross-on-Wye, a far cry from Athens, Alexandria and Cairo, where she had spent most of the 1940s. ‘Conditions were awful, shortages did make catering a nightmare,’ she recalled years later with only moderate equanimity. ‘And still there was no excuse, none, for such unspeakably dismal meals as in that dining room were put in front of me. To my agonized homesickness for the sun and southern food was added an embattled rage that we should be asked – and should accept – the endurance of such cooking.’ So she began ‘writing down descriptions of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking. Even to write words like apricot, olives and butter, rice and lemons, oil and almonds, produced assuagement.’ Subsequently, she added, ‘I came to realize that in the England of 1947, those were dirty words that I was putting down.’11

  The weather remained bitterly cold until well into March, but industry gradually got its power back and almost all the temporarily unemployed returned to work. The February restrictions on domestic use of electricity, however, remained in force until the end of April, and significantly, the clear evidence was of a rising trend from late February of covert consumption, suggestive of a general unwillingness to make peacetime sacrifices beyond a certain period. Although there were virtually no prosecutions for breaches of the domestic restrictions, the fact was that those restrictions were backed by legal sanctions; Vere Hodgson was one of the law-abiding millions getting increasingly browned-off. ‘We have struggled on all the week with no light and restricted hours of electricity,’ she noted on 3 March. ‘This is to go on. They have domestic consumers well under their thumb now. We are helpless and we just have to do as we are told.’ There were still two atrocious snowstorms to endure – in the south and Midlands on the 4th and 5th, when a train from Wolverhampton to London took 26 hours to complete its journey, and just over a week later in Scotland and the north – but eventually the weather did turn. ‘The thaw is here!’ exalted Gladys Langford on the 10th, and within a week it had spread from the south of England to elsewhere.12

  For Erica Ford, the young woman living in the queen of suburbs, Tuesday the 18th was a day of almost sublime, unquestioned normality:

  After doing my housework & putting on black suit, Daddy dropped me at Ealing Common [ie station] & I went to Knightsbridge & had look round Harrods. No good. Went up to Leicester Sq. for look at shoes – no good. Had snack lunch at Lyons. Met Gwen 1.30 at Swan & Edgars. Walked up Regent St. She got nice navy costume at Peter Robinson. Had tea Dickins & Jones. I got two-way stretch & sports belt at Lewis’s & some Goya perfume.

  Got home tired out 6.30. Bussed from town.

  But even as she wrote, widespread floods, caused by heavy rain accompanying the thaw, were affecting as many as 31 counties south of the River Ouse, destroying 70,000 acres of wheat and 80,000 tons of potatoes. It was the final supply-shortening, queue-lengthening twist to an unforgettable winter.

  To a government already much exercised by absenteeism, the temptation to make permanent the temporary ban on midweek sports meetings was irresistible. Although in the event toned down to a statutory ban only on midweek greyhound racing (the sport that was the particular bête noir of high-minded progressives), with more informal midweek restrictions applying to other sports (including football for the rest of the season), it could hardly have been a less popular initiative. ‘Austerity for the sake of it’ was the inevitable reaction of the Daily Express, while on 18 March a Daily Herald reader protested strongly, ‘The Government must give us some light in these days of austerity. Football and the dogs have been some of that light.’ That evening, as Erica Ford flopped down in Ealing, the limits to people’s willingness to continue to prioritise the largely cheerless concerns of the public weal were eloquently shown when a radio broadcast by Attlee on the current situation clashed with a rival attraction. Next day, Mass-Observation asked working-class Londoners between the ages of 30 and 55 whether they had listened to the Prime Minister. Four women are followed by five men:

  Yes I heard it. I didn’t pay much attention to it, it didn’t seem important and certainly wasn’t interesting.

  Yes I did, oh it wasn’t bad – nothing startling was there? – I don’t like the way he speaks, as if he is reading from a book.

  No, I haven’t read the paper today either.

  No – I had to go out most of last night – my daughter had a baby you know – a boy, 7 pounds it is.

  No, no I didn’t – I was listening to the boxing.

  No mate I didn’t, I heard somebody talking about it a little while ago, don’t know what they said – they just mentioned it.

  No I didn’t, it wasn’t advertised much was it? As a matter of fact there was something else on which I wanted to listen to very much – the boxing match.

  No, sorry chum I didn’t.

  I listened to half of it, that’s all. I got fed up with it and switched over to the fight . . . I was very disgusted with the result of the fight, the referee must have been ‘colour blind’. Ha! ha! ha! It wasn’t at all fair – & everyone else seems to think the same thing as well.

  The fight in question was the British Empire featherweight champion ship, at the Royal Albert Hall. Al Phillips of Aldgate won on points against Cliff Anderson from British Guyana – ‘an extremely unconvincing decision’, reported The Times, producing ‘a very mixed reception’.13

  It is debatable, though, how much the government’s standing was fundamentally affected by the big freeze. Polling figures by Gallup indicated a sharp short-term rise in dissatisfaction with Attlee and his ministers that was almost wiped out by May. Rather, the events of early 1947 should surely be seen as part of a longer-term continuum, in which existing weariness with life in post-war Britain merely deepened – a weariness that in itself did not automatically assume a concrete political form. By the end of March, one of the top hit tunes around, in the dance halls and elsewhere, was ‘Open the Door, Richard’, a recent number one in the US. ‘Wanting a thrill?’ asked one of Melody Maker’s columnists. ‘Get a load of Jack White . . . and see the jam-packed floor crowds lapping up the Astoria maestro’s sock version of “Richard”, with Sonny Rose at the burlesque end.’ Over the next few months, ‘Open the Door, Richard’ became a great catch-phrase, applicable to almost any kind of restriction in everyday life; Attlee was even advised to ‘Open the door, Richard’ and replace some of his less thrilling elderly ministers.14The political prize was there, in other words, for whoever could find the door’s key, real or rhetorical.

  ‘But the same owners and managers are still in charge of collieries, and they are doing the same things’ was the answer frequently given to Zweig that summer and autumn as he toured the coalfields and asked what difference the new dispensation had made. ‘We see hardly any difference in their behaviour.’ Those miners who were members of the new, much-trumpeted Colliery Consultative Committees tended to be particularly disenchanted: ‘We have no access to the books; the co-operation on the part of the managers is not genuine . . . Our suggestions are completely disregarded and little encouraged . . . We have as little to say about the colliery as before.’ A further problem was the excessive centralisation. ‘Before, we knew where we stood,’ a Derbyshire miner
explained. ‘When we had a grievance the manager could settle it in five minutes, if not on his own responsibility, after a short conversation on the telephone with the Agent. Now we cannot settle anything with the manager. When we come to the manager, he always shifts everything on to the back of the NCB. “I can’t do anything without the NCB,” he says. But we don’t know the NCB . . .’ Inasmuch as miners did know the NCB, Zweig found, ‘irritation and indignation are expressed against the high salaries of officials who have no special qualification’. Furthermore, ‘One often hears a certain irritation expressed when the miner is told he is now a partner. “Since the Government took over the mines,” a miner said to me, “the popular saying of the managers is, ‘It’s your pit now,’ but it is a mockery, because to most of us it does not matter, or benefit us, whether the mine pays or not.” If you mention to the miner that he is a partner, he can be very bitter about it.’ All in all, Zweig concluded, ‘there can be no denial that at present the miners are disillusioned about the outcome of nationalisation’.