Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Over the next few days, the investigator settled in, on Tuesday evening even enjoying the dancing:

  At 10.30 two of the Red-coats disappeared from the Ballroom with a big drum ready for the ‘Penny-on-the-Drum’ parade. This is a nightly occurrence which everyone appears to thoroughly enjoy. The main idea is that the Red-coats bang the drum as they walk along and gradually collect a long string of campers behind them by singing

  ‘Come and join us

  Come and join us

  Come and join our merry throng.’

  The procession begins in the Regency Bar, works its way all through the camp, through the Viennese Bar and ends up with everybody in the Viennese Ballroom. Everybody is laughing and singing at the top of their voices and the procession winds round and round in the Ballroom and finally breaks up when the orchestra strikes up for the final dance of the evening.

  Thursday evening featured the Campers’ Concert – 14 items, each ‘greeted with vigorous applause’ – and on Friday afternoon there was ‘Fun and Games’ at the giant Bathing Pool: ‘Everybody seemed in particularly good spirits . . . and felt a special kind of mateyness and comradeship with all their fellow campers.’ The camp as a whole was divided into four houses (Gloucester, Kent, Windsor, York); in her concluding remarks on her week’s experience, the investigator reckoned that the many inter-house competitions worked as well as they did because there was ‘a suspension of disbelief sufficient to give them a sense of communal effort and general mateyness’. The campers, in other words, did not suddenly abandon their critical faculties once they entered this cocooned world of communal pleasures on tap. ‘The picture sometimes painted of a set of solemn, suspicious, inhibited people arriving, and a set of slap-happy, healthy, gloriously carefree, 100% Butlinites leaving is distinctly wide of the mark; the vital thing is that some progress is made with everybody, giving a social atmosphere more healthy than the norm.’10

  The summer of 1947 was dramatic and expectant for Glenda Jackson. A labourer’s daughter, growing up in Hoylake, she took her 11 plus – only to find that on the day of the results there was a mix-up, involving a long, dreadful period at her girls’ primary school being given pitying looks by everyone while those who had passed received multiple congratulations. Eventually, on returning home, she found and read the letter announcing that she had passed. ‘I saw adults whom I had known all my life change their attitude to me twice in the space of a very small time,’ she recalled. ‘Contemptible.’

  That autumn, Jackson started at West Kirby Grammar School for Girls, where the expensive, distinctly middle-class uniform requirements included one’s own gym outfit, hockey stick and tennis racquet. Albert Finney, a bookmaker’s son from Salford and born on the same day as Jackson, also started at grammar school then, as did Bill Wyman, in his case at Beckenham and Penge Grammar School. ‘Ninety per cent came from upper- or middle-class homes in the expensive parts of suburban Kent,’ Wyman remembered. ‘Penge, my home, was definitely the wrong side of the tracks. I was inhibited by what other kids called my “working-class” accent, and a sense of inferiority prevented me from inviting them to my small and spartan home.’ Meanwhile, ‘local kids in Penge threw bricks at me, knocking my grammar-school blazer and cap (which my father could ill afford to buy).’ Altogether, it was ‘a no-win situation’, not least because ‘if I tried “talking posh” as they called it when I got home, I was mocked by everyone around me’.

  There were, however, significant straws in the wind pointing to a different, potentially less divisive future. At that year’s Labour Party conference a resolution from Bristol calling on the minister George Tomlinson to consider ‘the rapid development’ of common secondary schools, ‘in order to give real equality of opportunity to all the nation’s children’, received unanimous support, while over the next year a handful of local authorities were pushing hard for at least a quorum of comprehensives to be established. The new (but as yet far from universal) egalitarianism was epitomised by the 1948 report entitled The Comprehensive School by the National Association of Labour Teachers: ‘So long as this stratification of children at the age of eleven remains it is in practice useless to talk of parity in education or of equal opportunity in later life.’ After dismissing intelligence tests as ‘pseudo-scientific’ and intended ‘to create an intellectual aristocracy’, the report declared, ‘It is high time that we forgot the unverified assumption that only a small percentage of our children have sufficient native ability to move on to advanced work of a high standard.’

  Three Schools or One? was the title of Lady Simon of Wythenshawe’s discussion of the subject that same year. A leading, progressive-minded figure for many years on Manchester’s education committee, she here willingly accentuated the drawbacks of tripartism (grammar, modern, technical) and the positives of the comprehensive secondary school. Simultaneously, however, she felt bound to point out that ‘middle-class parents will not readily send their children to a school in which they feel that the tone of speech and behaviour will be set by children coming from the poorest homes.’ And she made an equally pertinent further point: such parents in this situation would, if they could afford it, look instead to the private sector.11

  10

  The Whole World Is Full of Permits

  There was much on the Labour Party’s mind by 1947/8 as – following the great burst of legislation since 1945 – it sought to orientate itself for the 1950s. Would it, for instance, tamely line up behind Ernest Bevin’s strong pro-American, anti-Communist line? Over Easter 1947, shortly after President Harry Truman had proclaimed his fiercely anti-Soviet Doctrine, denouncing Communism for its inherent expansionism and promising on the part of the free world an ‘enduring struggle’ against it, three youngish Labour MPs (Richard Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Mikardo) wrote an almost instantly published pamphlet, Keep Left. Critical of Bevin’s ‘dangerous dependence’ on the US, it demanded that British and French Socialists form an alliance sufficiently strong ‘to hold the balance of world power, to halt the division into a Western and Eastern bloc and so to make the United Nations a reality’. Within weeks there appeared a counter-pamphlet, Cards on the Table, written by Denis Healey on Bevin’s behalf and pouring the coldest of cold water on the notion that Britain had anywhere else but the US to turn to if it was serious about wanting to moderate Russia’s ‘aggressive anti-British policy’.

  Over the following nine months, two crucial developments persuaded Crossman et al to turn right. The first was the American initiative (first flagged in June 1947) that in due course became Marshall Aid: large-scale economic assistance to enable Europe’s (including Britain’s) post-war reconstruction, welcomed almost as much on the Labour left as on its right. The other, in February 1948, was the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which was extraordinarily hard to reconcile with a benign reading of Soviet foreign policy. The dramatic events in Berlin during the spring and summer – Russian blockade followed by Western airlift – merely confirmed the point. Benn Levy, briefly a Labour MP after becoming a well-known playwright, spoke in 1948 for many bruised and disillusioned Keep Lefters: ‘There is no longer a third choice. We must travel the Russian road or the American road . . . Are we to choose the American alignment which it is widely feared may jeopardise our Socialism, or the Russian alignment which, with the object lesson of Czechoslovakia in mind, we may reasonably believe would end in the loss of our democracy? For better or worse, the choice is made.’1. Levy did not need to add that that painful, deeply unenthusiastic choice was for the almighty (and more or less democratic) dollar – a choice that from the start precluded neither a continuing visceral anti-Americanism nor a lingering sentimental attachment to the Soviet Union and its stout-hearted people.

  As the Cold War set in during 1947/8, so the British Communist Party inexorably hardened its line and narrowed its options. The Labour government was now attacked by it at every opportunity, above all for its subservience to America, while Stalin and the Soviet Union received unstint
ing, unwavering support, whatever the circumstances and tergiversations. Inevitably, there were defectors. ‘I gradually became uncomfortable in the Party and hostile to it,’ the playwright Robert Bolt, then a student at Manchester University, recalled of this time. ‘I could get no sense out of the people I revered in the Party and no honest answers to the questions I was asking. So I left.’ Nor was there much evidence that the shift of approach was striking any great popular chords. Quite the reverse, as the writer (and youthful CP member) Mervyn Jones discovered when he went to Wigan in February 1948 to help the Communist candidate in a by-election:

  A few days before the poll, the Communists took power in Czechoslovakia. It was true that the crisis was provoked by the right-wing parties, who miscalculated their strength; but it was also obvious that the CP would establish a monopoly of power. Up in Wigan, Party leaders, including Harry Pollitt, hastily conferred and produced a leaflet which began: ‘Rejoice! Democracy has triumphed in Czechoslovakia!’ In the gloom of a snowy morning, I helped to hand it out at the gate of a cotton-mill. The workers littered the ground with it. We polled about 1,300 votes. A Communist candidate today [1987] would be more than satisfied with that figure, but in 1948 it was seen as disastrous.

  Overall, the onset of the Cold War could not but affect the temper of British public life. As early as May 1947, Attlee began to chair a Special Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities; in early 1948 the government established the Information and Research Department (IRD), essentially an anti-Communist propaganda unit; and on 15 March, soon after the Prague coup, Attlee announced that members of the CP and those ‘associated with it’ would henceforth be forbidden from undertaking work deemed ‘vital to the security of the State’. The immediate consequences were dramatic. There began the process of systematically investigating individual civil servants; new academic appointments were more or less closed for Communists or Communist sympathisers; and the BBC summarily dismissed Alex McCrindle, a Communist actor known to millions as ‘Jock’ in Dick Barton. Altogether it was hardly an edifying spectacle; yet whether the Attlee government’s quite aggressively illiberal anti-Communism necessarily occupied the moral low ground is arguably another matter. Context, the historian Alan Bullock would remind younger readers almost 40 years later, was all:

  There was a real danger of the Soviet Union and other communists taking advantage of the weakness of Western Europe to extend their power. We know now that this did not follow, but nobody knew it at the time. This was a generation for whom war and occupation were not remote hypotheses but recent and terrible experiences. The fear of another war, the fear of a Russian occupation, haunted Europe in those years and were constantly revived – by the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, by the Berlin blockade.

  It was unhistorical, in short, ‘to dismiss those fears as groundless because the war and occupation did not occur’.2.

  There were similar heart-searchings over nationalisation. By the summer of 1947, all the public-ownership commitments in the election manifesto had been implemented or were in train – with the exception of the iron and steel industry, always the most controversial of the 1945 promises. Utilities and transport, after all, were publicly owned in many other capitalist countries, while the coal industry in private hands had been generally acknowledged to be in the knackers’ yard. But the steel industry, although widely recognised to need a shakeup, was something else. Aneurin Bevan, whose constituency included the Ebbw Vale steelworks, pushed the hardest for early and full nationalisation, positing it not only as an economic and social good in itself but also as symbolically crucial in demonstrating that Britain’s first socialist government with an overall majority had not run out of steam. His opponents included the steelmasters, Lincoln Evans (leader of the steel workers’ union) and Herbert Morrison. Eventually, after some heated discussions, including at what was described as a ‘very hysterical and steamed up’ meeting of the parliamentary party, the Cabinet decided in favour of full nationalisation but not until the 1948/9 parliamentary session.

  For Morrison, it was a battle lost; henceforth, despite being the principal architect of the way in which nationalisation worked in practice, he was determined to impose an ‘enough is enough’ line, conscious no doubt that public ownership had never been a great vote-winner in the first place. ‘We definitely do not want to nationalise the small man – the shop round the corner,’ he told his party’s NEC Policy Committee in November 1947. ‘We must take care not to muck about with private enterprise, merely for the purpose of being spiteful.’ The following May, at the party conference in Scarborough, he similarly insisted that the government should now go slow on nationalisation and instead concentrate on consolidating its existing achievements.

  The whole question by this time seems to have touched a raw nerve, whatever the indifference of most workers in the nationalised industries themselves. ‘Nationalisation without democracy is not Socialism,’ Manny Shinwell told the same conference, ‘and we cannot claim that an industry or service is socialised unless and until the principles of social and economic democracy are implicit in its day-to-day conduct.’ That was also the view of Michael Young in Labour’s research department, but when in 1948 he wrote a party pamphlet on ‘industrial democracy’, privileging the rank-and-file worker above the union leadership and even flirting with the idea of workers’ control, the first edition had to be withdrawn after objections from both Bevan and Morrison. It was a revealing if heavy-handed intervention, for in the end the problem of how to make nationalisation work better would turn not on social liberation from below but on political and economic decision-making from above. Hugh Gaitskell, Shinwell’s successor as Minister of Fuel and Power, did not doubt where the sharp end lay, and a diary entry from June 1948 suggests that he was not the only one:

  An argument last night with Nye Bevan at our group dinner about nationalisation. Being, of course, a glutton for power he does not like the present policy of setting up the semi-autonomous Boards. He wants to control and answer for them; in fact to have them under him like departments. There is of course a good deal in what he says. Certainly it is no easy job to try and establish just the necessary degree of control without going too far. Also it is irritating not to be able to keep them on the right lines all the time. On the other hand there would, I think, be even greater dangers if, for instance, the Coal industries were run entirely by the Department. In any case we are now committed in the case of my industries to the principle of the semi-independent Board, and that being so one must give this particular form and relationship a fair trial.3.

  Gaitskell from the right and Bevan from the left were tacitly agreed, in other words, that control of the commanding heights was not for those toiling in the foothills.

  Even as the decision to defer steel nationalisation was being taken in August 1947, the Labour government was wrestling with what became known as the convertibility crisis. The implacable, inescapable problem was that from 15 July, in accordance with the terms of the American Loan over a year and a half earlier, sterling was fully convertible into dollars. Almost immediately there ensued an appalling drain of dollars from the country, accompanied by a run on the pound. A new round of belt-tightening – and all the attendant criticism – soon became inevitable. ‘At dinner we guessed what awful impositions Attlee would announce tomorrow,’ noted James Lees-Milne on Tuesday, 5 August, while staying at the Chequers Hotel in Newbury with Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. ‘Harold admits that he foresees no solution to the predicament we are in, and his reason for becoming a socialist is that socialism is inevitable. By joining he feels he may help by tempering it; by remaining outside he can do nothing. He says the sad thing is that no one dislikes the lower orders more than he does.’ Next day in the Commons, Attlee duly announced a range of cuts, involving food, petrol and films among other things.

  Over the next few days, the political temperature rose with the actual temperature, and Mass-Observation’s investigators managed a couple of
good ‘overheards’. The first was two middle-aged, working-class men on a bus in the City:

  Gor blimey Charlie – wot a bloody outlook etc. When are they going to stop cutting things I’d like to know. Still the people wanted em in, didn’t they? Now they’ve got em they’ve found out a thing or two.

  Worse than the war mate ain’t it?

  At least you knew wot was appening then but yer don’t know wot to expect now do yer.

  The other was a middle-class man travelling on a Southern Region train to Raynes Park: ‘They have got to do these things – after all you must admit they are luxuries. I don’t go to the films much so it won’t affect me, the cutting down of films. Rounding up the spivs is a good thing – they are a burden on the national effort. They will be doing more drastic things in the winter, you mark my words.’

  On the evening of Sunday the 10th, the day after Denis Compton and Middlesex had run riot at The Oval in front of 30,000, Attlee spoke to the nation – ‘surely the most colourless politician who ever broadcast’, according to Nella Last in Barrow. ‘Listen with me to the end,’ he asked before seeking to justify his measures, ‘and think and talk over what I have said afterwards.’ They half-obeyed that injunction at the Royal Clarence Hotel in Exeter, where Lees-Milne heard the speech. ‘In the crowded lounge it was received in grim silence,’ he observed. ‘When over not a soul spoke or made a single comment. Instead, he and she went on with their reading, so typically English. A sign of native phlegm or stupid indifference, who can tell?’ In any case, the measures failed to stem the crisis, as over the following week Britain’s dollar reserves continued to drain away with alarming rapidity. ‘The Government are in these matters, as in all others, worried, nervy, and incapable of reaching decisions,’ privately declared one of the Bank of England’s executive directors, ‘Ruby’ Holland-Martin, towards the end of the week.4.